beast of
burden; but how frankly, how good-naturedly, he had recognized the
new conditions, and adapted himself to them without a murmur! When the
military spirit was abroad, who so ready to be a squadron of cavalry,
a horde of Cossacks, or artillery pounding into position? He had even
served with honour as a gun-boat, during a period when naval strategy
was the only theme; and no false equine pride ever hindered him from
taking the part of a roaring locomotive, earth-shaking, clangorous,
annihilating time and space. Really it was no longer clear how life,
with its manifold emergencies, was to be carried on at all without a
fellow like the spotty horse, ready to step in at critical moments and
take up just the part required of him. In moments of mental depression,
nothing is quite so consoling as the honest smell of a painted animal;
and mechanically I turned towards the shelf that had been so long the
Ararat of our weather-beaten Ark. The shelf was empty, the Ark had
cast off moorings and sailed away to Poplar, and had taken with it its
haunting smell, as well as that pleasant sense of disorder that the best
conducted Ark is always able to impart. The sliding roof had rarely
been known to close entirely. There was always a pair of giraffe-legs
sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its
outline, and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were
uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade
on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be
their natural selves again. I think that none of us ever really thought
very much of Ham and Shem and Japhet. They were only there because they
were in the story, but nobody really wanted them. The Ark was built for
the animals, of course--animals with tails, and trunks, and horns, and
at least three legs apiece, though some unfortunates had been unable to
retain even that number. And in the animals were of course included
the birds--the dove, for instance, grey with black wings, and the
red-crested woodpecker--or was it a hoopoe?--and the insects, for there
was a dear beetle, about the same size as the dove, that held its own
with any of the mammalia.

Of the doll-department Charlotte had naturally been sole chief for a
long time; if the staff were not in their places to-day, it was not I
who had any official right to take notice. And yet one may have been
member of a Club for many a year without ev