Mr. Besant's novels, with an eye-glass, who held that
the whole duty of poets at least was to transfer the meanderings of
the inner life, or as much of them as were in any degree capable of
transmission, to immortal foolscap..Unfortunately, as he observed with a
mixture of pride and regret, the workings of his soul were generally so
ethereal as to baffle expression and comprehension; and, he was wont to
say, mixing up metaphors at a great rate, that he could only stand, like
the High Priest of the Delphic oracle, before the gates of his inner
life, to note down such fragmentary utterances as 'foamed up from the
depths of that divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds with
a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a condition of
grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties, and emotions
of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up in the epithet
'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately described only
by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the professor always fully
coincided.

With the two had entered the professor's little boy, a motherless child
of eight, who walked straight up to the bottle.

No sooner did the child's eyes light on the vessel than a curious thing
occurred. He fell down on his knees, bowed his head, and held up his
hands.

'Great Heavens!' cried the professor, forgetting himself, 'what do I
behold! My child is praying (a thing he never was taught to do), and
praying to a green butterfly! Hush! hush!' the professor went on,
turning to his friends. 'This is terrible, but most important. The child
has never been allowed to hear anything about the supernatural--his poor
mother died when he was in the cradle--and I have scrupulously shielded
him from all dangerous conversation. There is not a prayer-book in the
house, the maids are picked Agnostics, from advanced families, and I
am quite certain that my boy has never even heard of the existence of a
bogie.'

The poet whistled: the divine took up his hat, and, with a pained look,
was leaving the room.

'Stop, stop!' cried the professor, 'he is doing something odd.'

The child had taken out of his pocket certain small black stones of a
peculiar shape. So absorbed was he that he never noticed the presence of
the men.

He kissed the stones and arranged them in a curious pattern on the
floor, still kneeling, and keeping his eye on Mab in her bottle. At last
he placed one strangely shaped pebble