o much unsuspected courage, it is for Age one of the most
precious memories of its inner-life. No; Age envies Youth for its
innocence, its vigour and its strength; for its well-nigh unshakable
belief in itself, in the reality of happiness and of love: but Age
envies it so little--the mere fact of being young. It knows what lies
ahead of Youth, and, in that knowledge, there can be no room for envy.
The Dawn has its beauty; so too has the Twilight. And night comes at
length to wrap in darkness and in mystery the brightest day.

_The "Butters"_

Of all the human species--preserve, oh! preserve me from the monstrous
family of the Goats. I don't mean the people who go off mountain
climbing, nor those old gentlemen who allow the hair round their lower
jaw to grow so long that it resembles a dirty halo which has somehow
slipped down over their noses; nor do I mean the sheepish individuals,
nor those whom, in our more vulgar moments, we crossly designate as
"Goats." No; the people I really mean are the people who can never
utter a favourable opinion without butting a "but" into the middle of
it; people who, as it were, give you a bunch of flowers with one hand
and throw a bucket of cabbage-water over you with the other. People,
in fact, who talk like this: "Yes, she's a very nice woman, _but_ what
a pity she's so fat!" or, "Yes, she's pretty, _but_, of course, she's
not so young as she was!" Nothing is ever perfect in the minds of
these people, nor any person either. For one nice thing they have to
say concerning men, women, and affairs, they have a hundred nasty
things to utter. They are never completely satisfied by anything nor
anybody, and they cannot bear that the world should remain in ignorance
of the causes of their dissatisfaction.

It isn't that they know there is often a fly in the amber so much as
that they perceive the fly too clearly, and that amber, even at its
best, always looks to them like a piece of toffee after all. How
anybody ever manages to live with these kind of people perpetually
about the house I do not know. And the worst of it is there seems no
cure for the "Goats," and, unlike real Goats, nothing will ever drive
them into the wilderness for ever. Even if you do occasionally drive
them forth, they will return to you anon to inform you that the
wilderness, to which you have never been, is a hundred times nicer than
the cultivated garden which it is your fate to inhabit. The most