For a full minute I could feel the currents of opinion swaying over me, at this infamous proposal; then the old black-cock, the one whose tail is in my wife’s hat, said sharply: “Specimen! He’s not good enough!” And once more, for all my indignation at that gratuitous insult, I breathed freely. “Come!” said the lady bear quietly: “Let us dribble on him a little, and go. The ferocious brute is not worth more!” And, during what seemed to me an eternity, one by one they came up, deposited on me a little saliva, looking into my eyes the while with a sort of horror and contempt, then vanished on the moor. The last to come up was the little meerkat without its head. It stood there; it could neither look at me nor drop saliva, but somehow it contrived to say: “I forgive you, ferocious brute; but I was very happy!” Then it, too, withdrew. And from all around, out of invisible presences in the air and the heather, came once more the shivering whisper: “Look at him! The ferocious brute! Oh, look at him!” I sat up. There was a trilling sound in my ears. Above me in the blue a curlew was passing, uttering its cry. Ah! Thank Heaven!--I had been asleep! My day-dream had been caused by the potted grouse, and the pressure of the _Review_, which had lain, face downwards, on my chest, open at the page where I had been reading about the man-eating lions, and the death of those ferocious brutes. It shows what tricks of disproportion little things will play with the mind when it is not under reasonable control. And, to get the unwholesome taste of it all out of my mouth, I at once jumped up and started for home at a round pace. GROTESQUES Κυνηδόν I The Angel Æthereal, on his official visit to the Earth in 1947, paused between the Bank and the Stock Exchange to smoke a cigarette and scrutinise the passers-by. “How they swarm,” he said, “and with what seeming energy--in such an atmosphere! Of what can they be made?” “Of money, sir,” replied his dragoman; “in the past, the present, or the future. Stocks are booming. The barometer of joy stands very high. Nothing like it has been known for thirty years; not, indeed, since the days of the Great Skirmish.” “There is, then, a connection between joy and money?” remarked the Angel, letting smoke dribble through his chiselled nostrils. “Such is the common belief; though to prove it might take time. I will, however, endeavour to do this if you desire it, sir.” “I certainly do,” said the Angel; “for a less joyous-looking crowd I have seldom seen. Between every pair of brows there is a furrow, and no one whistles.” “You do not understand,” returned his dragoman; “nor indeed is it surprising, for it is not so much the money as the thought that some day you need no longer make it which causes joy.” “If that day is coming to all,” asked the Angel, “why do they not look joyful?”