e than the tilt hammers that smote me in Sheffield,
than the files of the scissors-grinder at the door. I heard heart-strings
snap as I went through the linen, and in the white pleats to be folded over
the still heart I saw the snow banked on a grave. Give me, the old
scissors, fifty bridal dresses to make rather than one shroud to prepare.

I never recovered from the chill of those dismal days, but at the end of
life I can look back and feel that I have done my work well. Other scissors
have frayed and unraveled the garments they touched, but I have always made
a clean path through the linen or the damask I was called to divide. Others
screeched complainingly at their toil; I smoothly worked my jaws. Many of
the fingers that wrought with me have ceased to open and shut, and my own
time will soon come to die, and I shall be buried in a grave of rust amid
cast-off tenpenny nails and horse-shoes. But I have stayed long enough to
testify, first, that these days are no worse than the old ones, the
granddaughter now no more proud than the grandmother was; secondly, that we
all need to be hammered and ground in order to take off the rust; and
thirdly, that an old scissors, as well as an old man, may be scoured up and
made practically useful.

CHAPTER XI.

A LIE, ZOOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED.

We stand agape in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of
the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great
animals thirty feet long and eleven feet high are extinct.

Now, while we do not want to frighten children or disturb nervous people,
we have to say that the other day we caught a glimpse of a monster beside
which the lizards of the saurian era were short, and the elephants of the
mammalian period were insignificant. We saw it in full spring, and on the
track of its prey. Children would call the creature "a fib;" rough persons
would term it "a whopper;" polite folks would say it was "a fabrication;"
but plain and unscientific people would style it "a lie." Naturalists might
assign it to the species "Tigris regalis," or "Felis pardus."

We do not think that anatomical and zoological justice has been done to the
lie. It is to be found in all zones. Livingstone saw it in Central Africa;
Dr. Kane found it on an iceberg beside a polar bear; Agassiz discovered it
in Brazil. It thrives about as well in one clime as another, with perhaps a
little preference for the temperate zone. It lives on