"I wish there was some way of knowing beforehand about such things," she complained.
"When F—— came," I said, airily, "there was the same feeling in our family; we all wanted so that she should be a girl. H—— was so comforting. He said she certainly would be, if there was anything in heredity; her mother was a girl, and all her aunts, and both her grandmothers. And she did turn out to be a girl, you see."
Mrs. C—— S—— looked at me with her mild blue eyes, and said, happily—"I wonder if there is really anything in that; for you know it's just the same in our family!"
October 6.
The Little Dumb Brother.
I have been reading in one of the magazines a record of travel in the Rocky Mountains of the Arctic regions. It is illustrated with pictures of some ten polar bear skins—two of them evidently mere babies of bears—a dead ram, a dead caribou—the former killed, the author explains, to furnish the first food he had in forty-four hours. He concludes his article with this naive charge: "Wolves, when pressed by hunger, do not hesitate to fall upon one of their own number and sacrifice it to their beastly cravings. They are utterly lacking in conscience, and the young or weak of every class of land animals suffer from their wanton lack of mercy."
Such wicked wolves! And how about those baby bears?
It is the same point of view as that of the Spanish bull fighters. "They are not Christians—they have no souls—why consider them?"
As I have said before, very probably the decent, well-behaved, kindly Roman citizen of Nero's day, returning with his family from a pleasant afternoon at the gladiatorial shows, gathered his children about the household altar, offered pious libation to the gods, and went peacefully to bed with a clean and untroubled conscience. It was all simply a question of the point of view. A Roman citizen was certainly not going to be disturbed by a sense of wrong-doing in watching the pangs of such creatures as Christians or barbarians.