"But what do you mean by innocent?" returned Mr. Raymount. "The nature of an animal may be low and even hateful, and its looks correspondent, while no conscience accuses it of evil. I have known half a dozen cows, in a shed large enough for a score, and abundantly provisioned, unite to keep the rest of the herd out of it. Many a man is a far lower and worse creature in his nature that his conscience tells him. It is the conscience educated by strife and failure and success that is severe upon the man, demanding of him the all but unattainable."
Talk worse and worse for an aquarium! But happily they had now reached the tank of the octopods.
Alas, there had been some mismanagement of the pipes, and the poor devil-fishes had been boiled, or at least heated to death! One small, wretched, skinny thing, hardly distinguishable from a discolored clout, was all that was left of a dozen. Cornelius laughed heartily when informed of the mischance.
"It's a pity it wasn't the devil himself instead of his fish!" he said. "Wouldn't it be a jolly lark, Mr. Vavasor, if some of the rascals down below were to heat that furnace too hot, and rid us of the whole potful at one fell swoop!"
"What is that you are saying, Corney?" said his mother, who had but just rejoined them.
"I was only uttering the pious wish that the devil was dead," answered Cornelius; "—boiled like an octopus! ha! ha! ha!"
"What good would that do?" said his father. "The human devils would be no better, and the place would soon be re-occupied. The population of the pit must be kept up by immigration. There may be babies born in heaven, for any thing I know, but certain I am there can be none in the other place. This world of ours is the nursery of devils as well as of saints."
"And what becomes of those that are neither?" asked Vavasor.
"It were hard to say," replied Mr. Raymount with some seriousness.
"A confoundedly peculiar family!" said Vavasor to himself. "There's a bee in every bonnet of them! An odd, irreverent way the old fellow has with him—for an old fellow pretending to believe what he says!"