“That animal,” said his master, “--he looks like a dog, but who would be positive what he was!--is the cleverest in the pack. He seems to me a rare individuality. His ancestors must have been of all sorts, and he has gathered from them every good quality possessed by each. Think what a man might be--made up that way!” “Why is there no such man?” I said. “There may be some such men. There must be many one day,” he answered, “--but not for a while yet. Men must first be made willing to be noble.” “And you don’t think men willing to be made noble?” “Oh yes! willing enough, some of them, to be _made_ noble!” “I do not understand. I thought you said they were not!” “They are willing enough _to be made_ noble; but that is very different from being willing _to be_ noble: that takes trouble. How can any one become noble who desires it so little as not to fight for it!” The man drew me more and more. He had a way of talking about things seldom mentioned except in dull fashion in the pulpit, as if he cared about them. He spoke as of familiar things, but made you feel he was looking out of a high window. There are many who never speak of real things except in a false tone; this man spoke of such without an atom of assumed solemnity--in his ordinary voice: they came into his mind as to their home--not as dreams of the night, but as facts of the day. I sat for a while, gazing up through the thin veil of water at the blue sky so far beyond. I thought how like that veil was to our little life here, overdomed by that boundless foreshortening of space. The lines in Shelley’s _Adonais_ came to me: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.” Then I thought of what my host had said concerning the too short lives of horses, and wondered what he would say about those of dogs. “Dogs are more intelligent than horses,” I said: “why do they live a yet shorter time?” “I doubt if you would say so in an Arab’s tent,” he returned. “If you had said, ‘still more affectionate,’ I should have known better how to answer you.” “Then I do say so,” I replied. “And I return, that is just why they live no longer. They do not find the world good enough for them, die, and leave it.” “They have a much happier life than horses!” “Many dogs than some horses, I grant.”