e, how
they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?'

'Electric Light of the World,' I said, 'it is like this. While they are
still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in
picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is
shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide
waters,--silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim
and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract with some such big
restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then
at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in
the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin--for this is
the happiest time in the young whitebait's life: it is at these
silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of
whitebait arranged for. Well, night after night, they thus lie in the
moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny
scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated. Ah! how sad
they are when the end of that happy time has come!'

'And what happens to them after that?' asked the Sphinx.

'One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with
treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a holiday
again to seek the moon--the moon that for a moment seems captured by the
pearl-fishers of the sky. And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon
appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon
the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices
call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in
flight--to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net
as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently
hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the
coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches. The rest is silence.'

'What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!' said the
Sphinx--as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that
but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky. Its spirit sang just
above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts
of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.

But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.

THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE

The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at _Romeo and Juliet_. It was the
first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon