to have been all there was of it in the
beginning."

The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go
so far as that."

The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't
know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed
together again.

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock
of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came
toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady,
greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last
where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with
his paws.

"No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the
way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues.
You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any."

"There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the
boat-house with a basketful."

"But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel
all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get.
That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call
character-building. Get along!"

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a
moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the
feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.

"I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity
included kindness to animals."

"I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the
peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my
natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He
seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged."

The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered
foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they
sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent
so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had
to ask, "Where were we?"

"Cultivating force of character in squirrels."

"I thought we had got by that."

"Then we had come round to ourselves again."

"Something like that," the first friend reluctantly allowed.

"What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that's
what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves."

"Whom should we have left? Other