meaningless as polished stones without the eloquent
ears that stand behind them and tell her thoughts. Curiosity, suspicion,
alarm, anger, submission, friendliness, every emotion that flits across
her quick, sensitive mind speaks through them. They are in touch with
her soul, and half the music of her life is played on them. And if you
abstract yourself from individuals and look at that thing, the ear, in
the wide field of life, what a great, living reality it is!--a spiritual
unity under infinite diversity of material form and fashion. It is like
the telegraph wire overhead, the commonest and plainest of material
things, but charged with the silent and invisible currents of the life
of the world.

"Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore."

[Illustration: OR PERHAPS WHEN IT WANTS TO LISTEN IT RAISES A FLIPPER TO
ITS EAR.]

Birds have no ears, nor have crocodiles, nor frogs, nor snakes. Ears
seem to be for beasts only. And not for all beasts. Seals are divided by
naturalists into two great families--those with ears, and those without.
The common seal belongs to the latter class, and the sea-lion to the
former. A common seal lives in the sea, and when it does wriggle up on
the beach of an iceberg there is nothing to hear, I suppose, or perhaps
when it wants to listen it raises a flipper to its ear. I never saw one
doing so, but we do not see everything that happens in the world. The
sea-lion, with its stouter limbs, can lift its forepart, raise its head
and look about it, and even flop about the ice-fields at a respectable
rate. And there is no doubt that one of these is as much above an
earless seal as fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay.
When performing seals are exhibited at a circus sitting on chairs,
catching balls on the points of their noses and playing diabolo with
them, or balancing billiard cues on their snouts, and doing other
miraculous things, they are always sea-lions, not common seals. Of
course, I do not mean to insinuate that sea-lions invented the ear and
stuck it on: that would be unscientific; but I mean that their general
intelligence and interest in affairs created that demand for more
distinct hearing which led to the development of an ear trumpet. This
view is wholly scientific, though pedants may quarrel with my way of
putting it.

The sea-lion's ears are very minute, mere apologies one might think; but
don't be hasty. The finny prey of the sea-lion makes n