ittle naughtier, to the Royal
Institution to be a little more scientific, than they are in actual life.
It is only by pulsations of goodness, naughtiness, and whatever else we
affect that we can get on at all. I grant that when in his office, a man
should be exact and precise, but our holidays are our garden, and too
much precision here is a mistake.

Surely truces, without even an _arriere pensee_ of difference of opinion,
between those who are compelled to take widely different sides during the
greater part of their lives, must be of infinite service to those who can
enter on them. There are few merely spiritual pleasures comparable to
that derived from the temporary laying down of a quarrel, even though we
may know that it must be renewed shortly. It is a great grief to me that
there is no place where I can go among Mr. Darwin, Professors Huxley,
Tyndal, and Ray Lankester, Miss Buckley, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen and
others whom I cannot call to mind at this moment, as I can go among the
Italian priests. I remember in one monastery (but this was not in the
Canton Ticino) the novice taught me how to make sacramental wafers, and I
played him Handel on the organ as well as I could. I told him that
Handel was a Catholic; he said he could tell that by his music at once.
There is no chance of getting among our scientists in this way.

Some friends say I was telling a lie when I told the novice Handel was a
Catholic, and ought not to have done so. I make it a rule to swallow a
few gnats a day, lest I should come to strain at them, and so bolt
camels; but the whole question of lying is difficult. What _is_ "lying"?
Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the lower animals, whose
unsophisticated nature proclaims what God has taught them with a
directness we may sometimes study, I find the plover lying when she lures
us from her young ones under the fiction of a broken wing. Is God angry,
think you, with this pretty deviation from the letter of strict accuracy?
or was it not He who whispered to her to tell the falsehood--to tell it
with a circumstance, without conscientious scruple, not once only, but to
make a practice of it so as to be a plausible, habitual, and professional
liar for some six weeks or so in the year? I imagine so. When I was
young I used to read in good books that it was God who taught the bird to
make her nest, and if so He probably taught each species the other
domestic arrangements best suite