But a lot of foxes look at first like something else. I have seen a fox that at a distance looked like a little dog.
There is a real shame that every one should have. But there is another kind just as bad as the vine-spoiling fox. It is the shame of the life that is afraid to show its colours.
You know in the war how proud every loyal person was to wear a little flag in the buttonhole; how we hung flags in our churches so every one could see where we stood. On all our public buildings the nation's flag was flung to the breeze, and even in our schools the girls and boys were proud to stand up and salute, and sing the national anthem.
You will see men everywhere who wear pins or seals or rings that show they belong to some society; and in college, the students hang on the walls the pennants with the names of their home town or their college, and nobody blushes because they are there.
But, oh, how many girls and boys get so different when asked to show where they stand on questions of right and wrong. They blush, and apologize, and look so shy, and feel so queer—with their ears red and the goose-flesh running up and down their backs. They are out and out for some things, and very neutral for others.
Neutral may be a rather big word, but your mother will tell you about it when she goes to the dry-goods store. There are some ribbons whose colour you are not sure of. They are of no outstanding tint, a sort of dull gray with no mark to it. They call them neutral colours.
They may be all right. But girls and boys like that are a terrible sight.—Neither this nor that—ashamed to come out; afraid to say where they stand.
In the war, at one time, there were prominent people who were afraid to have a conviction on Belgian and French outrages, or on the sinking of the Lusitania, and it did not add to public opinion about them. It was called spiritual neutrality; which is just a big learned way of saying it had no character.
That spirit nobody in his heart admires. You girls and boys do not. You love to read about the knights of old, and how they wore their armour and rode their chargers, and carried their spears, and did not blush to let everybody know who they were. Sir Walter Scott describes one in these words:
"Proudly his red-roan charger trode,
His helm hung at the saddle-bow;
Well by his visage you might know
He was a stalwart knight and keen,
And had in many a battle been.
His eyebrow dark, and eye of fire,
Showed spirit proud, and prompt to ire;
Yet lines of thought upon his cheek
Did deep design and counsel speak;
His square-turned joints, and strength of limb,
Showed him no carpet-knight so trim,
But in close fight a champion grim,
In camps a leader sage."