ws the last, the woman's word.

XVI

QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS

They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might
be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a
bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man
feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of
the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was
holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious
not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had
been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man
could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who
pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their
native independence to something like the condition of those pauper
wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image
of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the
Government's dole of beef-cattle.

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his
thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the
squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've
been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the
'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man?"

[Illustration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK]

"I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other
friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part
of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began
to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and
the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and
remembered those in bonds as bound with them."

"Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb
creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century.
There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds,
didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And
several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good
deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a
pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They
were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have
come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of
broiled squabs? I