m, a few go further than the rest. It
is idle to talk of human thought; there is no such thing. Our minds are
fed as our bodies with the food God has provided for us. Thought hangs
by the wayside, and we pick it and cook it, and eat it, and cry out what
clever 'thinkers' we are!"

"I cannot agree with you," replied the Minor Poet, "if we were simply
automata, as your argument would suggest, what was the purpose of
creating us?"

"The intelligent portion of mankind has been asking itself that question
for many ages," returned the Philosopher.

"I hate people who always think as I do," said the Girton Girl; "there
was a girl in our corridor who never would disagree with me. Every
opinion I expressed turned out to be her opinion also. It always
irritated me."

"That might have been weak-mindedness," said the Old Maid, which sounded
ambiguous.

"It is not so unpleasant as having a person always disagreeing with you,"
said the Woman of the World. "My cousin Susan never would agree with any
one. If I came down in red she would say, 'Why don't you try green,
dear? every one says you look so well in green'; and when I wore green
she would say, 'Why have you given up red dear? I thought you rather
fancied yourself in red.' When I told her of my engagement to Tom, she
burst into tears and said she couldn't help it. She had always felt that
George and I were intended for one another; and when Tom never wrote for
two whole months, and behaved disgracefully in--in other ways, and I told
her I was engaged to George, she reminded me of every word I had ever
said about my affection for Tom, and of how I had ridiculed poor George.
Papa used to say, 'If any man ever tells Susan that he loves her, she
will argue him out of it, and will never accept him until he has jilted
her, and will refuse to marry him every time he asks her to fix the
day."'

"Is she married?" asked the Philosopher.

"Oh, yes," answered the Woman of the World, "and is devoted to her
children. She lets them do everything they don't want to."

THE DEGENERATION OF THOMAS HENRY

The most respectable cat I have ever known was Thomas Henry. His
original name was Thomas, but it seemed absurd to call him that. The
family at Hawarden would as soon think of addressing Mr. Gladstone as
"Bill." He came to us from the Reform Club, _via_ the butcher, and the
moment I saw him I felt that of all the clubs in London that was the club
he must have come