_J_. Ah, do not abuse the gentle element. It is hardly possible to have
too much of it, and indeed, if I were obliged to choose amid the four,
it would be the one in which I could bear confinement best.

_S_. You would make a pretty Undine, to be sure!

_J_. Nay, I only offered myself as a Triton, a boisterous Triton of the
sounding shell ... You; M. I suppose, would be a salamander, rather.

_M_. No! that is too equivocal a position, whether in modern mythology,
or Hoffman's tales. I should choose to be a gnome.

_J_. That choice savors of the pride that apes humility.

_M_. By no means; the gnomes are the most important of all the elemental
tribes. Is it not they who make the money?

_J_. And are accordingly a dark, mean, scoffing,--

_M_. You talk as if you had always lived in that wild unprofitable
element you are so fond of, where all things glitter, and nothing is
gold; all show and no substance. My people work in the secret, and their
works praise them in the open light; they remain in the dark because
only there such marvels could be bred. You call them mean. They do not
spend their energies on their own growth, or their own play, but to feed
the veins of mother earth with permanent splendors, very different from
what she shows on the surface.

Think of passing a life, not merely in heaping together, but making