"I confess," replied the idler, "that our usages with regard to vermin
and reptiles might be so amended as to be more temperately diabolical;
but please to remember that the gentle agonies with which we afflict
_you_ are wholesome and exhilarating compared with the ills we ladle
out to one another. During the reign of His Pellucid Refulgence,
Khatchoo Khan," he continued, absently dropping his wriggling auditor
into the brook, "no less than three hundred thousand Persian subjects
were put to death, in a pleasing variety of ingenious ways, for their
religious beliefs."

"What that has to do with your treatment of _us_" interrupted a fish,
who, having bitten at the worm just then, was drawn into the
conversation, "I am quite unable to see."

"That," said the angler, disengaging him, "is because you have the
hook through your eyeball, my edible friend."

Many a truth is spoken in jest; but at least ten times as many
falsehoods are uttered in dead earnest.




LXXVI.


A wild cat was listening with rapt approval to the melody of distant
hounds tracking a remote fox.