se and breathless
eagerness." This is true of only a minority of the hunters. I have more
frequently bought additional fish than thrown away those I have caught.
Why? Because the weariness and difficulty of catching two or three rock
bass had impressed me with the value of a whole string of fish. You have
seen

THE ANXIETY OF THE CAT

to make the captive mouse believe she is not on guard. She walks away
with the utmost indifference. But let the mouse so much as move its
crushed little body, she is upon it with the ferocity of the greatest
members of her agile tribe. So it is with us. Let our possession escape
us, our consternation is complete. Again the spring uncoils, and again
we are madmen. "A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love
that would seem hid; love's night is noon," says Shakspeare. "It is
better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all" sings
Tennyson. "Nothing but real love," says Lord Lytton, "can repay us for
the loss of freedom, the cares and fears of poverty,

THE COLD PITY OF THE WORLD

that we both despise and respect." "Love," says Sir Thomas Overbury,
wittily, "is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath
made." "To reveal its complacence by gifts," says Mrs. Sigourney, "is
one of the native dialects of love." "Love is never so blind as when it
is to spy faults," says South. "Love reckons days for years," says
Dryden, "and every little absence is an age." "Where love has once
obtained an influence," observes Plautus dryly, "any flavoring, I
believe, will please." "That is the true reason of love," says Goethe,
"when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could either have
loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us."

"NO CORD OR CABLE CAN DRAW

so forcibly or bind so fast," says melancholy Burton, "as love can do
with only a single thread." "Where there exists the most ardent and true
love," says Valerius Maximus, "it is often better to be united in death
than separated in life." "A man of sense may love like a madman," says
Rochefoucauld, "but not like a fool." Says Addison, who was a bachelor,
and knew little about the heart: "Ridicule, perhaps, is a better
expedient against love than sober advice; and I am of the opinion that
Hudibras and Don Quixote may be as effectual to cure the extravagance of
this passion as any one of the old philosophers." "Love lessens woman's
delicacy and increases man's," says