I have but speculated widely concerning mouse mythology. Truth compels me to state that it is to me, after all, but dim and debatable territory. I can give you nothing authoritative as to their philosophy. But this I know: they have maintained their gentleness, and are a reproach to those whom I take to be their gods.

All else is but speculation and possibility, but this is the evidence of their lives. They are a meek and a forgiving people. Think only what they endure at our hands, who justly make so great a matter of a Belgium violated, and forget, in a god-like manner, when it so pleases us, a violated Congo, or a divided Persia, or a Poland outraged and cut to pieces, but not defended! How gentle, how consistent, how without spite, ill-will, or grudge, they remain toward those unalterably hostile to them! With what mildness not matched among us do they conduct themselves! How they preserve their cheerfulness, their good nature, their kindliness! Have you not heard with what gayety they roll hickory-nuts away? Has your ear not witnessed their gigglings and rejoicings?

But their virtues go deeper than this. It may be told of them above all, that, however provident in other matters, they store up no malice, they preserve no hate.

Once I lay ill in that house of which I have here written. I had been very wretched, but my physician, seated now by my bed, promised me I would soon be well. After that we spoke together, as we were wont to do, of matters of a philosophic kind, then paused. At the bottom of my bed, on the footboard, was a tiny mouse. No; it was not the same adventurous spirit who had visited the giant's castle and drunk from the plate of milk; this one was smaller and more slender. We did not speak. He came down cautiously, very gently, to the coverlet, then delicately up one fold, down another, pausing, listening, waiting to take note; pausing, waiting, foot delicately lifted, until he had got as far as the tray. He went very carefully about this, smelling and inspecting it; yes, I would have sworn, inspecting. It had every air of his wanting to know whether they had brought me the right and well-cooked food. He tasted nothing save a tiny crumb on the tray itself, and then, as though satisfied, was gone.

I hoped for another visit, but waited for him in vain. He was a little fellow, sleek of skin, with a black, beady eye, and very delicate whiskers. I never saw a daintier foot.

BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS

I

Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests—very endearingly, it seems to me—against the custom of particular thankfulness for food. He suspects that it had its origin in the "hunter state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall and looked like a special Providence.—"It is not otherwise easy to be understood," he avers, "why the blessing of food—the act of eating—should have had a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence."

I find myself like-minded and similarly protestant as to birthdays. I cannot discover why the blessing of these should be hailed with any very particular delight, distinct from that implied joy with which we might be expected to welcome the many other various days of the year.

It cannot be said that it was because I was abnormally shy throughout my childhood that I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no more than the usual shyness of the average child. Moreover, my surroundings and training gave me easy confidence in others and in myself. The tragedies of my little girlhood were not exceptional: dead cats or canaries, broken dolls, the inability to make myself always understood by grown-ups, and certain moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms known only to myself and what I took to be my fearfully disappointed Maker. But barring these things, incident and customary, my early years may be said to have been especially bright and reassuring. What was it, then, which could have caused this early distrust of birthdays?