they were far ahead of me!"

"That is true. But you were not a rod to measure them with! Certainly,
if they knew what you know, not to say what you might have known, they
would be ahead of you--out of sight ahead! but you saw they were not
growing--or growing so slowly that they had not yet developed the
idea of growing! they were even afraid of growing!--You had never seen
children remain children!"

"But surely I had no power to make them grow!"

"You might have removed some of the hindrances to their growing!"

"What are they? I do not know them. I did think perhaps it was the want
of water!"

"Of course it is! they have none to cry with!"

"I would gladly have kept them from requiring any for that purpose!"

"No doubt you would--the aim of all stupid philanthropists! Why, Mr.
Vane, but for the weeping in it, your world would never have become
worth saving! You confess you thought it might be water they wanted: why
did not you dig them a well or two?"

"That never entered my mind!"

"Not when the sounds of the waters under the earth entered your ears?"

"I believe it did once. But I was afraid of the giants for them. That
was what made me bear so much from the brutes myself!"

"Indeed you almost taught the noble little creatures to be afraid of the
stupid Bags! While they fed and comforted and worshipped you, all the
time you submitted to be the slave of bestial men! You gave the darlings
a seeming coward for their hero! A worse wrong you could hardly have
done them. They gave you their hearts; you owed them your soul!--You
might by this time have made the Bags hewers of wood and drawers of
water to the Little Ones!"

"I fear what you say is true, Mr. Raven! But indeed I was afraid that
more knowledge might prove an injury to them--render them less innocent,
less lovely."

"They had given you no reason to harbour such a fear!"

"Is not a little knowledge a dangerous thing?"

"That is one of the pet falsehoods of your world! Is man's greatest
knowledge more than a little? or is it therefore dangerous? The fancy
that knowledge is in itself a great thing, would make any degree of
knowledge more dangerous than any amount of ignorance. To know all
things would not be greatness."

"At least it was for love of them, not from cowardice that I served the
giants!"

"Granted. But you ought to have served the Little Ones, not the giants!
You ought to have given the Little Ones water; then they would soon
h