rthly organisms playing fast and loose with the borderland, not only
of plants and animals, but of the one and of the many-celled. First a
swimming lily, Stentor, a solitary animal bloom, twenty-five to the
inch; Cothurnia, a double lily, and Gonium, with a quartet of cells
clinging tremulously together, progressing unsteadily--materially
toward the rim of my field of vision--in the evolution of earthly life
toward sponges, peripatus, ants and man.

I was interrupted in my microcosmus just as it occurred to me that
Chesterton would heartily approve of my approximation of Sirius and
Stentor, of Capella and Cothurnia--the universe balanced. My attention
was drawn from the atom Gonium--whose brave little spirit was striving
to keep his foursome one--a primordial struggle toward unity of self
and division of labor; my consciousness climbed the microscope tube
and came to rest upon a slim glass of amber liquid on my laboratory
table: a servant had brought a cocktail, for it was New Year's Eve.
(Now the thought came that there were a number of worthy people who
would also approve of this approximation!) I looked at the small
spirituous luxury, and I thought of my friends in New York, and then
of the Attas in front of the laboratory. With my electric flash I went
out into the starlight, and found the usual hosts struggling nestward
with their chlorophyll burdens, and rushing frantically out into the
black jungle for more and yet more leaves. My mind swept back over
evolution from star-dust to Kartabo compound, from Gonium to man, and
to these leaf-cutting ants. And I wondered whether the Attas were any
the better for being denied the stimulus of temptation, or whether I
was any the worse for the opportunity of refusing a second glass. I
went back into the house, and voiced a toast to tolerance, to
temperance, and--to pterodactyls--and drank my cocktail.

IX

HAMMOCK NIGHTS

There is a great gulf between pancakes and truffles: an eternal,
fixed, abysmal canyon. It is like the chasm between beds and hammocks.
It is not to be denied and not to be traversed; for if pancakes with
syrup are a necessary of life, then truffles with anything must be, by
the very nature of things, a supreme and undisputed luxury, a regal
food for royalty and the chosen of the earth. There cannot be a shadow
of a doubt that these two are divided; and it is not alone a mere
arbitrary division of poverty and riches as it would appear on the
su