“Well, Rose, how do you like it?”
“Oh, papa, it is splendid!
“Where are we going?” she added, as the canoe was run ashore.
“The men will put the fish under a bush, to be out of the sun; and now, what were you about to ask? I saw a question ready in your eyes.”
“I wish, papa—I wish I did not think the fish had a dreadful time. I have to think of pleasure holding the rod and tragedy at the end of the line.”
“Upon my word, Rose, you are emphatic. I can assure you, my dear, that you may safely keep your emotional statements for another occasion.
“Let me tell you something. Once when fishing on the Nipigon, I saw an odd-looking, very large trout. He rose every time I cast, and at last took the fly. Now, why the salmon takes the fly, not Solomon could say, because he eats nothing while in the rivers; but trout are pigs for greediness. When I looked this hungry trout over, he was still bleeding from a fish-hawk’s claws, and his intestines and liver were hanging in the water. Such pain, or injury if you like, as this, does in man utterly destroy appetite and cause inaction. The inference is plain enough: fish cannot be said to suffer what we call pain. I once took a striped bass which had been terribly torn by a gaff. On the whole, Rose, I conclude that, as we go down the scale of life, there is less and less of what we call pain, and at last, probably, only something nearer to discomfort or inconvenience.”
“Is that so? Then we hold our higher place at the cost of suffering, which must increase as we go on rising through the ages to come?”
“Yes,” said Lyndsay, looking aside with freshened curiosity at this young logician. “Yes, the rule must work both ways. But man alone has the power to limit, lessen, even annihilate pain. The amount of pain in the civilized world must have been vastly diminished within forty years, since we got ether and the like.”
“And will not that in time lessen our power to endure? But then,” she added quickly, “that might be of less moment if we are always increasingly able to diminish or stop pain.”