rd and beast;
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER III

TOM was now quite amphibious. You do not know what that means?

You had better, then, ask the nearest Government pupil-teacher, who may
possibly answer you smartly enough, thus--

"Amphibious. Adjective, derived from two Greek words, _amphi_, a fish,
and _bios_, a beast. An animal supposed by our ignorant ancestors to be
compounded of a fish and a beast; which therefore, like the
hippopotamus, can't live on the land, and dies in the water."

However that may be, Tom was amphibious: and what is better still, he
was clean. For the first time in his life, he felt how comfortable it
was to have nothing on him but himself. But he only enjoyed it: he did
not know it, or think about it; just as you enjoy life and health, and
yet never think about being alive and healthy; and may it be long before
you have to think about it!

He did not remember having ever been dirty. Indeed, he did not remember
any of his old troubles, being tired, or hungry, or beaten, or sent up
dark chimneys. Since that sweet sleep, he had forgotten all about his
master, and Harthover Place, and the little white girl, and in a word,
all that had happened to him when he lived before; and what was best of
all, he had forgotten all the bad words which he had learned from
Grimes, and the rude boys with whom he used to play.

That is not strange: for you know, when you came into this world, and
became a land-baby, you remembered nothing. So why should he, when he
became a water-baby?

Then have you lived before?

My dear child, who can tell? One can only tell that, by remembering
something which happened where we lived before; and as we remember
nothing, we know nothing about it; and no book, and no man, can ever
tell us certainly.

There was a wise man once, a very wise man, and a very good man, who
wrote a poem about the feelings which some children have about having
lived before; and this is what he said--

"_Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,