ster entered the house it always
seemed glad, almost like a dog, and when cold or tired it snuggled up
in a fold of his blanket with the utmost confidence.

We have all heard of ferocious animals, lions and tigers, etc., that
were fed and spoken to only by their masters, becoming perfectly tame;
and, as is well known, the faithful dog that follows man and serves
him, and looks up to him and loves him as if he were a god, is a
descendant of the blood-thirsty wolf or jackal. Even frogs and toads
and fishes may be tamed, provided they have the uniform sympathy of
one person, with whom they become intimately acquainted without the
distracting and varying attentions of strangers. And surely all God's
people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play.
Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small
mischievous microbes,--all are warm with divine radium and must have
lots of fun in them.

As far as I know, all wild creatures keep themselves clean. Birds, it
seems to me, take more pains to bathe and dress themselves than any
other animals. Even ducks, though living so much in water, dip and
scatter cleansing showers over their backs, and shake and preen their
feathers as carefully as land-birds. Watching small singers taking
their morning baths is very interesting, particularly when the weather
is cold. Alighting in a shallow pool, they oftentimes show a sort of
dread of dipping into it, like children hesitating about taking a
plunge, as if they felt the same kind of shock, and this makes it easy
for us to sympathize with the little feathered people.

Occasionally I have seen from my study-window red-headed linnets
bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce. A large Monterey
cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew
lodges in still nights made favorite bathing-places. Alighting
gently, as if afraid to waste the dew, they would pause and fidget as
they do before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the
drops in showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool. I
have also seen the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of
silver firs on the edge of a glacier meadow, but nowhere have I seen
the dewdrops so abundant as on the Monterey cypress; and the picture
made by the quivering wings and irised dew was memorably beautiful.
Children, too, make fine pictures plashing and crowing in their little
tubs. How widely different from wallowi