_M._ Water, water everywhere. After Niagara one would like a dry strip
of existence. And at any rate it is quite enough for me to have it
under foot without having it overhead in this way.

_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,