l, irreligious, losing the end joint of the
little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow
ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial beauty.

It seems almost like what the scientific people call a Law. And by
strenuous efforts the creature just keeps pace with his losses--devises
clothes, wigs, artificial teeth, paddings, shoes--what civilised being
could use his bare feet for his ordinary locomotion? Imagine him on a
furze-sprinkled golf links. Then stays, an efficient substitute for the
effete feminine backbone. So the thing goes on. Long ago his superficies
became artificial, and now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar,
and the figure he has abandoned remains distended with artificial ashes,
dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears.
Will he go on shrinking, I wonder?--become at last a mere lurking atomy
in his own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a complex
mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and papier-mache, stolen from the
earth and the plant-world and his fellow beasts? And at last may he not
disappear altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest
machinery, neatly clad and loaded up with sound principles of action,
walk to and fro in a regenerate world? Thus it was my mind went dreaming
in St. George's Hall. But presently, as I say, came the last word about
stomachs, and the bald men woke up, rattled their umbrellas, said it was
vastly interesting, and went toddling off home in an ecstasy of advanced
Liberalism. And we two returned to the place whence we came.

OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN

Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much
more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not
been written. These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to
turn over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a
candle. Turning to another topic, primitive man in the works of the
descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very entertaining and quaint
person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would
appeal to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As Ruskin has said
somewhere, _a propos_ of Darwin, it is not what man has been, but what
he will be, that should interest us.

The contemplative man in his easy-chair, pondering this saying, suddenly
beholds in the fire, through the blue haze of his pipe, one of these
great unwritten vo