annot help. It is your nature. So were you made--we know you cannot
change--you amuse us! Go on, little cat!' Would it not then be better,
and less savoury of humbug if we said the same to her whose cat-soul has
chanced into this human shape? For assuredly she will but pilfer, and
scratch a little, and be mildly vicious, in her little life, and do no
desperate harm, having but poor capacity for evil behind that petty,
thin-upped mask. What is the good of all this padlock business for such
as she; are we not making mountains out of her mole hills? Where is our
sense of proportion, and our sense of humour? Why try to alter the make
and shape of Nature with our petty chisels? Or, if we must take care of
her, to save ourselves, in the name of Heaven let us do it in a better
way than this! And suddenly I remembered that I was a Grand Juryman, a
purifier of Society, who had brought her bill in true; and, that I might
not think these thoughts unworthy of a good citizen, I turned my eyes
away from her and took up my list of indictments. Yes, there she was, at
least so I decided: Number 42, "Pilson, Jenny: Larceny, pocket-picking."
And I turned my memory back to the evidence about her case, but I could
not remember a single word. In the margin I had noted: "Incorrigible
from a child up; bad surroundings." And a mad impulse came over me to go
back to my window and call through the bars to her: "Jenny Pilson! Jenny
Pilson! It was I who bred you and surrounded you with evil! It was I
who caught you for being what I made you! I brought your bill in true!
I judged you, and I caged you! Jenny Pilson! Jenny Pilson!" But just as
I reached the window, the door of my waiting-room was fortunately opened,
and a voice said: "Now, sir; at your service!"...

I sat again in that scoop of the shore by the long rolling seas, burying
in the sand the piece of paper which had summoned me away to my Grand
Jury; and the same thoughts came to me with the breaking of the waves
that had come to me before: How, in every wave was a particle that had
known the shore of every land; and in each sparkle of the hot sunlight
stealing up that bright water into the sky, the microcosm of all change
and of all unity!
1912.

GONE

Not possible to conceive of rarer beauty than that which clung about the
summer day three years ago when first we had the news of the poor Herds.
Loveliness was a net of golden filaments in which the world was caug