. But there is another thing that is of the
greatest consequence--this: that all men, if they do not take care, go
down the hill to the animals' country; that many men are actually, all
their lives, going to be beasts. People knew it once, but it is long
since they forgot it.'

'I am not surprised to hear it, ma'am, when I think of some of our
miners.'

'Ah! But you must beware, Curdie, how you say of this man or that man
that he is travelling beastward. There are not nearly so many going
that way as at first sight you might think. When you met your father
on the hill tonight, you stood and spoke together on the same spot; and
although one of you was going up and the other coming down, at a little
distance no one could have told which was bound in the one direction
and which in the other. Just so two people may be at the same spot in
manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better and the other
worse, which is just the greatest of all differences that could
possibly exist between them.'

'But ma'am,' said Curdie, 'where is the good of knowing that there is
such a difference, if you can never know where it is?'

'Now, Curdie, you must mind exactly what words I use, because although
the right words cannot do exactly what I want them to do, the wrong
words will certainly do what I do not want them to do. I did not say
you can never know. When there is a necessity for your knowing, when
you have to do important business with this or that man, there is
always a way of knowing enough to keep you from any great blunder. And
as you will have important business to do by and by, and that with
people of whom you yet know nothing, it will be necessary that you
should have some better means than usual of learning the nature of them.

'Now listen. Since it is always what they do, whether in their minds
or their bodies, that makes men go down to be less than men, that is,
beasts, the change always comes first in their hands--and first of all
in the inside hands, to which the outside ones are but as the gloves.
They do not know it of course; for a beast does not know that he is a
beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it.
Neither can their best friends, or their worst enemies indeed, see any
difference in their hands, for they see only the living gloves of them.
But there are not a few who feel a vague something repulsive in the
hand of a man who is growing a beast.

'Now here is wh