"Were you really? The man must have thought the stars looked like the eyes, as if when the animal was made the Creator went to the sky itself for that fire. Think of a Being that could rise to the very stars and take their light in His hand."
"Ouf!" the small man cried naïvely. "I shouldn't want to take fire in my hand!"
"The writer of the poem was thinking what a wonderful Being He must be that could do it; but that if He could make a creature like the tiger, He would be able to do anything."
The boy reflected a moment, and then, with a frank look, asked: "Did the fire in a tiger's eyes really come out of the stars?"
"I don't think that the poem means that it really did," was my answer. "I think it means that when the poet thought how wonderful a tiger is, with the life and the fierceness shining like a flame in his eyes, and how we cannot tell where that fire came from, and that the stars overhead were scarcely brighter, it seemed as if that was where the green
light came from. He was trying to say how wonderful and terrible it was to him,—especially when he thought of coming upon the beast all alone in the forest in the night with nobody near to defend him."
The boy was silent, and thinking hard. He had evidently not yet clearly grasped all the idea.
"But God didn't make a tiger on an anvil and put pieces of stars in for eyes," he objected.
"You told me yesterday that Bruno swims like a duck. He doesn't really, for a duck goes on the top of the water."
"Oh, but I meant that Bruno goes as fast as a duck."