Not having been present during his short illness or at the time of his death, I cannot relate any of the scenes accompanying them; but the kind old keeper who attended him declares that he never became reconciled to the death of Elisheba, and that his loneliness preyed upon him almost as much as the disease. When I looked upon his cold, lifeless body, I felt that I was indeed bereft of one of the dearest and most loyal pets that any mortal had ever known. His fidelity to me had been shown in a hundred ways, and his affections had never wavered. How could any one requite such integrity with anything unkind? To those who possess the higher instincts of humanity it will not be thought absurd in me to confess that the conduct of these creatures awoke in me a feeling more exalted than a mere sense of kindness. It touched some chord of nature that yields a richer tone. But only those who have known such pets as I have known them can feel towards them as I have felt. I have no desire to bias the calm judgment or bribe the sentiment of him who scorns the love of nature, by clothing these humble creatures in the garb of human dignity; but to him who is not so imbued with self-conceit as to be blind to all evidence and deaf to all reason, it must appear that they are gifted with faculties and passions like to those of man; differing in degree, but not in kind. Moved by such conviction, who could fail to pity that poor, lone captive in his iron cell, far from his native land, slowly dying? It may be a mere freak of sentiment that I regret not having been with him to soothe and comfort his last hours, but I do regret it deeply. He had the right to expect it of me, as a duty. Poor little Aaron! In the brief span of half a year he had seen his own mother die at the hands of the cruel hunters; he had been seized and sold into captivity; he had seen the lingering torch of life go out of the frail body of Moses; he had watched the demon of death binding his cold shackles on Elisheba; and now he had himself passed through the deep shadows of that ordeal. What a sad and vast experience for one short year! He had shared with me the toils and the dangers of sea and land over many a weary mile. He seemed to feel that the death of his two friends had been a common loss to us; and if there is any one thing which more than another knits the web of sympathy about two alien hearts, it is the experience of a common grief.