said, with some unwonted solemnity, "surely it is possible to do both, to love and to kill? Does not the Power who makes us also slay us? Do we not kill Him whom we love and love Him whom we crucify?" My aunt was already nettled, for she can ill bear contradiction even at the hands of the lords of creation; but to be bearded by a minx, and such a gentle and usually submissive minx as Hilda, goaded her to fury. "I think you are abominably profane, Hilda," she retorted. "You don't happen to be God or anything like Him, neither are the angling fraternity like Him, for they take delight in blood and deceit, although for certain we know that you are so devoted to men that you put them in the place of God." With this last thrust my aunt sailed up to her room, and the curate tried to comfort the undaunted Hilda by assuring her that St. Paul, at least, taught women to regard men as being in the place of God to them. I believe he got more instruction than thanks, for I saw her eyebrows move and noticed that he seemed very limp when she had finished with him but I could not hear what happened, for the anglers had begun to talk now aunt Susan was gone, and one of

them was quoting Tennyson about "Nature red in tooth and claw.'

I

But is Nature red in tooth and claw? rather find her teeth to be of a china white and her claws of the cleanest horn, and the wonder of wonders is that, except in morbid man, nature cheerfully accepts death and the danger of it, as part of a hugely delicious game. The swallow catches gnats, but you may see her dash through a cloud of them and scatter them for one moment, yet they come together again in a hardly interrupted chassez and set to partners. Even the dancing aristocrats of the Terror would hardly have continued their sports, after guillotinists had snatched a partner or two from the very centre of their cotillons. 'The sparrow is speared by the shrike' sometimes but the sparrow, if the spear misses him shakes his feathers, tweats once or twice and picks up his lunch, as if it were just the shrike's fun,-rather a nuisance, but shrikes will be shrikes. Have we not spent hours too, on a fine warm glassy day, when the fish are too wide awake to bite, watching the lords of Midney lock, the pike regnant, lying snug in the wrack at the lower end? Over his bull-dog face and before his small

naughty eyes the dace or roachlets play in shoals. They almost brush him as they pass to and fro, the little fools, as merry sinners as ever met their wages. Every half-hour or it may be twenty minutes, his tail flicks. They seem to know the signal, for they stand a little away. Suddenly he is gone and the water eddies. Little dark marks dash to and fro and we see nothing until things settle. The water clears. The jack has a silly little fish sideways in his jaws and is back almost exactly where he was, and, O wonder of wonders, the little fishes are back at their frolics, just as secure as ever, while the victim can still be seen motionless in those cruel, no not cruel but deadly, jaws, numbed and crushed. If one can imagine a school playground in the full swing of the break and a loose tiger lies in the corner : would any body of human scholars rather like his bloody company and prefer to play next about his very whiskers? It is plainly unimaginable; and it is not 'our bit,' to play hop scotch in the hot breath of tigers: nor, on the other hand, need we impute our terrors and agonies to those who know them We take our risks, at least some of us do, the healthy ones, much as the roachlets

not.

take theirs. We walk downstairs and lunch without a pang, yet the annals of surgery are full of the dangers and disasters caused by stairs. We face our maybe arsenical beer, our ptomaine crab, our gastric water, scarlatina milk, and all the other chances of life. If we realize that this or that means death in the pot, we merely avoid it serenely, and if we do get caught we do the best we can and don't rail against the laws of Nature, which have helped us to spend a pleasant time, while it lasted.

Yes! and Hilda, do you remember that pike which cleared out other fishes from the Earnshill pool, just where those two queer holes run into the water? I meant to kill him myself, but I saw him killed. You know that baby alderbush? I was coming to it a-tiptoe one clear day, with three minnows in a chutney bottle, when I saw three little ripples and heard the soft suspicion of a cough. I held as still as if I were Baden Powell scouting, and saw the otter, you know the one I mean, was sniffing along the edge of the water. Suddenly he and the pike saw each other and there was a scramble. I saw shadows, flickering shadows and the surface splashed. That pike went

from the old willow to the little one, I think, and then across and back. Finally he resigned the game and gave himself up, as quietly as an old lag, when the police have really cornered him. The other simply took him, without any fuss at all, as one might take three half-pence at Nap which one had won; and then I shewed myself, and the otter glided off like a puff of silent smoke, pike and all disappeared, and shortly after the perches took my minnows with much serenity. We all live by death, and near it and if our old friend (whom we call Nebuchadnezzar) is right when he says "where there is meat there is murder," we can reply "where there is cabbage there is cruelty and where there are tomatoes there is tomahawking." By forswearing angling or meat, or corn, we do not cease to kill. If fishes enjoy life, so does every flower, according to Wordsworth, enjoy the air it breathes, and probably its great joy comes from dodging the attempts of the primrose to bonnet it while still a seedling, or of the dandelion to throttle and sting its roots, of the dog roses to stab it, or of the trees to kill it with hunger and thirst. If I shall meet all the fishes I have killed at the day of