be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too
preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and
pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals.
But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his
gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar.

"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet--" In that "and yet"
there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to
share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes--such is the
magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction.

"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with
rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with
the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little
wood is a world of plunder and prey'--is that any reason why we should
be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature
is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange
little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating
each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of
building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship
and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature
there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate.
Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building
too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at
work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to
whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her
finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus
of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes--of all her children--Nature
has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom
she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for