said nothing of "safe" Yahoos. On reflection, however, he did not feel
quite secure of this part of his defense; he remembered that the leading
brutes had favorites, who were employed in certain simple domestic
offices about their masters, and it seemed doubtful whether the
contemplated vindication would not break down on this point. He smiled
queerly to himself as he thought of these comparisons, but his heart
burned with a dully fury. Throwing back his unhappy memory, he recalled
all the contempt and scorn he had suffered; as a boy he had heard the
masters murmuring their disdain of him and of his desire to learn other
than ordinary school work. As a young man he had suffered the insolence
of these wretched people about him; their cackling laughter at his
poverty jarred and grated in his ears; he saw the acrid grin of some
miserable idiot woman, some creature beneath the swine in intelligence
and manners, merciless, as he went by with his eyes on the dust, in his
ragged clothes. He and his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers
and contempt, and contempt from such animals as these! This putrid filth,
molded into human shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver them,
thinking no foulness too foul if it were done in honor of those in power
and authority; and no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were
contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed; it was to this obscene and
ghastly throng that he was something to be pointed at. And these men and
women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before the awful altar of God,
before the altar of tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by
Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven; and in their very
church they had one aisle for the rich and another for the poor. And the
species was not peculiar to Caermaen; the rich business men in London
and the successful brother author were probably amusing themselves at the
expense of the poor struggling creature they had injured and wounded;
just as the "healthy" boy had burst into a great laugh when the miserable
sick cat cried out in bitter agony, and trailed its limbs slowly, as it