This was more than I could endure. The murmur went straight to my heart, and I unlocked my arms. No sooner had I done so, than Lulu disappeared, like a shadow, into her apartment, the door of which she locked and bolted, laughing at her triumph.

I returned quietly to my chamber, and went to bed. Fitzarthur gave no sign of having been even for a moment awake: on the next day, too, no allusion even betrayed any knowledge, upon his part, of the events of the night. I have but one more fact to record, concerning the elegant and goodhumored Fitz. In forty-eight hours he departed from Belleair, and never returned.

VII.

A YOUNG LADY'S CONFESSION.

In

I did not leave quite so soon. fact, I am now residing at Belleair, being a married man, and quite a patriarch, with every prospect of benefitting my real grandchildren, by this history.

It was toward the end of our honeymoon that I said to Lulu one day:

"Do you remember the ghost, Lu?" I laughed as I spoke; but Lulu did not laugh-she looked grave.

66

Very well, indeed, I shall never forget it," she said, "and I shall not cease to reproach myself for it."

"Reproach yourself?"

"I must. I do not think it was deficate in a young lady, and I never should have ventured to do it, had not the girls spurred me on, and played upon my girlish wildness. From what I have since heard of Mr. Fitzarthur, I do not regret the result of the jest-his departure-but I do regret having been led to sacrifice so much to a practical joke."

"Because-because-I thought." And Lulu laughed again, and leaned her arm upon my shoulder, looking down into my eyes, which were raised, from the book I was reading, to her face. "You thought,—well, madam Sphynx?"

Because I thought that any one who held me so tightly as you did that night, sir-and very improperly, sirmust-love me very much, indeed!"

And with the most bewitching and fascinating glance, madam Lulu burst into laughter.

"Horrible!" I cried, "What a confession for a young lady!-that she was actually won by an audacious embrace!"

Lulu looked penitent and sad. "Was it wrong to say it?" she murmured with downcast eyes.

Very wrong, madam !" "Was it ?" she repeated.

Yes."

"But you won't be angry with me, will you, cousin?" she said, which words were followed by a shock of laughter, such as I have seldom heard. You see, I have the loveliest wife in the world, and I have related the manner in which I courted her.

THE HERE are two verses in holy writ, speaking of what we haughtily call the brute creation, that have ever seemed to us full of secret meaning and great import. When the Almighty had destroyed all flesh upon earth, save Noah and those in his ark, he made a new covenant, and as a token of it he set a bow in the clouds. "A covenant

with you and with your seed," he said to Noah; adding, however, " and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth." The inspired author himself calls it, therefore, "an everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon earth." The rainbow on high is, then, a sign for the lowly animal, as well as for proud man. What matters it, whether the gentle dove, with the olive branch, or the gigantic whale in the ocean know, or do not know, that such a bond exists between them and Him, whom we ought to call, in a much wider sense, Our Father who is in heaven?

One and the same covenant, then, binds animals and us to our Maker. Surely they must be more than a mere brute creation; and well may we ask, with many an ancient and modern philosopher: What is the animal's inner life?

A pity it is, that the word animal itself has become a term of contempt and disgrace; like all other borrowed words, it has taken the place of a better Saxon word (feoh), and now is commonly misapplied. We speak of precious stones and fertile plants with respect, and yet is not even the royal palin, in all its graceful splendor, and the brilliant diamond, with its floods of light, far below the humblest of worms, that creeps on the earth? The Romans knew much better the sense that bound the word to its owner; with them, animal only signified the anima, the breath of life-that high distinction among all created beings. And what a variety of terms they employed besides, for tame or wild, for clean or unclean animals! We have, at best, only the viie word beast, still lower in sense, and more reproachful in meaning than animal, and, to design the last and most loathsome, the term vermin, which corresponds to weeds among plants.

Still, it is not with us only, that men have found it difficult to say what distinguishes animals from other created beings. The sages of antiquity had their various theories; the philosophers of later days have established their systems, one after another. To the one, all animals were gods; and, even now, the gentle children of East India venture not to kill any being that has the breath of life; for do not the gods love to assume the forms of creatures, and do not their holy books teach, that the dying man, who seizes the tail of a cow, passes through her without hindrance, at once into heaven? The Spanish physician Pereira went to the other extreme. He first taught that animals neither thought nor felt; they had neither senses nor sensations; they were beautiful mechanisms, moving in the manner of a watch, which shows time more accurately than all reasoning could do. A little later, the great Descartes also gave to men, only, souls, and regarded animals as machines. He denied them even hunger and thirst, much more all desire or will-what could a mere automaton know or intend? Joy and pain, he said, were there only in appearance; their motions were the result of unconscious instinct; of course, when the dog barked, the machine was merely grating and creaking. His work was received with respect and applause; it was read even in the nunneries of France. Fortunately, gentlemen cannot be made cruel, but Cartesians are still found, in far too large numbers, among wagoners and physicians, butchers and naturalists. Did Descartes really fancy that a living pigeon was nothing more than the wooden bird, that clapped its wings and flew about, thanks to the skill of Archytas? Or would he have wished to compare his own head with that made by the great Archbishop of Ratisbon, AIbertus Magnus? Another savant of that fanciful nation was taught, by an amusing occurrence, the folly of his cherished convictions. Traveling through the southern provinces, he was once impatiently waiting for his dinner. It never appeared; for the unfortunate landlord declared, upon his honor, that the dog, "whose duty it was to turn the spit, could not be found." Thereupon a great search was undertaken by all the

cooks and scullions, with the hungry philosopher among them. It appeared, that the inn-keeper had two dogs, who performed their work on alternate days; he whose turn it was on that day, being sick, the other animal, or rather the other machine, could not be induced to serve. He stood upon his rights: he knew it was not his day, and neither flattery nor threats could induce him to submit to such crying wrong! The savant lost his roast; but he insisted no longer that "animals were but machines."

Even in our day, great are the doubts, and many the battles fought, to settle the boundary lines between the great kingdoms of nature. It is easy to say that the pebble is a stone, the oak a plant, and the lion an animal. But the lines are not always so broad, nor the signs so conclusive. How nearly even minerals often resemble the work of man's skill and most exquisite art! Who ever found, for the first time, a beauteous rock-crystal, and doubted for a moment that its smooth, bright sides and its well-pointed pyramid were the result of the jeweler's careful labor? For centuries men thought that the lofty ranges of basaltic columns, as they are found here and there, standing in thousands, like gallant soldiers, in close ranks, all smooth and bright as if just from the polisher's hand, and their six sides as carefully measured as if to show how completely our mother nature is master of her mathematics, were the work of Titans, belonging to ages of fabulous antiquity. Other minerals, especially those we call talc, perfectly resemble plants. One variety looks like the bark of a tree, another like leather, and the finest amianth of Corsica can hardly be distinguished from the silky hair attached to the seed of the Syrian asclepias.

So difficult is it to draw the line between the two lower realms; and yet there is an impassable chasm between them, not less than the gulf that parted Dives from the beggar, who had starved at his gate, and was now in Abraham's bosom. Minerals exist, and they assume form and shape; but they do not live. Surely, man's lofty mind ought to be able to distinguish between death and life. He has, however, not been more successful as yet, in the two higher kingdoms. Not even the form enables us to distinguish the plant from

the animal. For ages the polypi were considered as plants; and even now the sponge is claimed by both great divisions. Certain crickets, like the familiar devil's riding-horse, resemble dead sticks, and the "religious mantis" is for all the world like a withered leaf. A South American lady's slipper appears, in form, size, and color, like a huge spider, whilst many an orchis assumes the shape of an insect. Plants, it has been said, cannot change place, and animals only have motion. But vegetables also move; not merely mechanically, as the mimosa, but freely and independent of all outward irritation. The common water-lentil rises to the surface, at the time of blooming, and descends when its purpose is fulfilled. The hungry ivy sends its shoots to the tempting chalk, the passion flower extends its roots to distant water, and the prosy potato, kept in a cellar, pushes its pale, sickly shoots many feet to the lighted window.

Certain tiny confervæ, observed but of late, are ever found waving to and fro; the larger leaves of the hedy sarum gyrans rise and fall in gentle alternation, one after another, whilst the smaller perform a circular motion; and barberries, like a thousand similar plants, move certain parts of their flowers, with great and independent activity. The pistil of the collinsonia even touches first one and then the other anther, in regular change, during the short time of love! It is, in like manner, no longer believed that plants do not sleep. We all know now, that most plants, from the humblest herb to the giant oak, sleep during the winter. Others sleep at given times; the "lazy girl" wakes latest in the field, even long after the common clover, that waits for the warm rays of the sun; a few sleep only in the day, and wake all night, as the hesperis, or dame's violet. Nor can

we now claim for animals an exclusive right to internal heat, as was formerly firmly believed. So far from it, we find that many plants have, at a certain age, a fever heat that rises and falls at stated intervals, and varies by many degrees, whilst the lowest classes of animals have no heat of their own, but only share that of the medium in which they are living.

Even feeling and instinct are no longer looked upon as attributes of any one

realm of nature. We can scarce believe that the polypi feel, which, after having been pounded in a mortar for a whole day, are seen to stretch out their arms, as soon as they are put into water, and to grow, and feed, and live as before. Oysters are proverbially unfeeling creatures. The little watersnake, naïs, about an inch and a half long, may be cut into twenty-six pieces, and each one puts out a new head and a new tail, and becomes a new snake. How many plants would show more feeling and die, if they were so treated! If instinct be no more than an innate impulse, shown in some outward action, it may be found even in minerals. They assume ever like forms, regular, beautiful, and admirably adapted to their special nature. With plants this instinct becomes still more evident; we may place the grain in the ground, in what manner we choose, it will always send its tiny roots downward, and the gentle, graceful plumule upward, to greet the light of day.

Hence the growing conviction, that there must be an inner life in animals. Formerly, learned men claimed for them a soul, and not a soul of their own, but the same as that given to

man.

We

This was a pregnant error. have no microscope for souls, and the subtlest anatomist and the boldest physiologist are left at a loss here. If man were really the highest in creation, and animals only the lower, they would present to us nothing but defective organizations, whilst all that has come from our Maker's hand is, in itself, perfect. Man is not the same being as the animal, only in a higher powerhe is something entirely different. He is what Goethe calls a macrocosm, uniting in himself all the various bodily and psychical parts of animals, and superadding to them qualities peculiarly his own. The very act and mode of creation exhibits the difference. Animals were made by intermediate agents. God said: "Let the water bring forth, abundantly, the moving creature that hath life, and the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven;" and later: "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, the cattle and creeping thing, and the beast of the earth." But when the higher beings were to be added, he said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." So God

himself made man, not intrusting the duty to the earth or the water.

What was the "breath of life" given to animals, to the "moving creature that hath life?" This only we know, that it is not the soul of man, and hence the injustice of measuring the inner life of animals by the spirit given to the former. Modern investigations generally agree in granting to animals two distinct and peculiar qualities. They possess, it is said, instinct, or a number of certain ideas, that are born with them, reproduced in all times, under all circumstances, and incapable of change. The young chick, hatched in the Egyptian's oven, breaks through its shell and at once runs after the spider by instinct; the sea-turtle, born far inland, on a high and dry mountain, hastens at the moment of birth, with irresistible eagerness, to the sea-shore, by instinct. By it, the bee, the bird, and the beaver build their marvelous houses. But animals also possess intelligence-a power of acting freely under the influence of memory or training. The horse obeys, because he fears or loves his master; the dog, after having carefully examined two out of three roads, that meet at a common crossing, takes the third without further examination: his intelligence supersedes his instinct. Both qualities meet in the power of discernment, and this we believe to be the most characteristic feature of the inner life of animals. If the minerals possessed this power, they would surely show it at the moment of crystallization, when they blossom; for then they exhibit their highest powers, their greatest internal activity. But we find here no trace of discernment: they never yield to circumstances, nor change their immutable laws. Plants have a faint gift of discernment only in their powers of adaptation. Plants, that in our green-houses press their leaves against the window-panes, and flowers, that follow the sun from east to west, must be able to discern light. But in animals, alone, this power becomes clear, distinct, and even varied, improving visibly from the lowest upward. The universe is there for all; but it is not opened to all alike. Where the outer organs of perception are wanting, there, of course, the inner knowledge also is wanting. The worm discerns only his food or a want of food; the butterfly knows colors; the eagle discerns men, ani