ted, yet face to face with the realities of existence it is unavailing.  Clasping the living, standing beside the dead, our language still is but a cry.  Our wants have grown more complicated; the ten-course banquet, with all that it involves, has substituted itself for the handful of fruits and nuts gathered without labour; the stalled ox and a world of trouble for the dinner of herbs and leisure therewith.  Are we so far removed thereby above our little brother, who, having swallowed his simple, succulent worm, mounts a neighbouring twig and with easy digestion carols thanks to God?  The square brick box about which we move, hampered at every step by wooden lumber, decked with many rags and strips of coloured paper, cumbered with odds and ends of melted flint and moulded clay, has replaced the cheap, convenient cave.  We clothe ourselves in the skins of other animals instead of allowing our own to develop into a natural protection.  We hang about us bits of stone and metal, but underneath it all we are little two-legged animals, struggling with the rest to live and breed.  Beneath each hedgerow in the springtime we can read our own romances in the making - the first faint stirring of the blood, the roving eye, the sudden marvellous discovery of the indispensable She, the wooing, the denial, hope, coquetry, despair, contention, rivalry, hate, jealousy, love, bitterness, victory, and death.  Our comedies, our tragedies, are being played upon each blade of grass.  In fur and feather we run epitomised.”

“I know,” said the Woman of the World; “I have heard it all so often.  It is nonsense; I can prove it to you.”

“That is easy,” observed the Philosopher.  “The Sermon on the Mount itself has been proved nonsense - among others, by a bishop.  Nonsense is the reverse side of the pattern - the tangled ends of the thread that Wisdom weaves.”