Old lamps for new, kicks for halfpence—“Heads I win, Tails you lose”—such are the laws of equity by which man deals with his neighbour; and so the contest goes on, if, indeed, as Juvenal says, that can be called a contest— “Ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum.”[1] The slave of the princess with the long name had passed more of her life in the palace than the streets, or she would not have found the magician’s cry so strange: would have felt uncomfortably conscious that the day might come when she, too, would barter new lamps for old, perhaps humbly on her knees, entreating permission to make the unequal exchange. In all the relations of life, but chiefly in those with which the affections are concerned, we constantly see gold for silver offered with both hands. That “it is better to give than to receive” we have Scriptural warrant for asserting. That— “Sure the pleasure is as great In being cheated as to cheat,” we learn from Butler’s quaint and philosophical couplets. I am not going to assert that the man who puts down sovereigns and takes up shillings has really the worst of it; I only maintain that the more freely he “parts” with the former, the more sparing will he find the latter doled out to him in return. Perhaps the strongest case in point is that of parent and child. In the animal world I know few arrangements of Nature more beautiful than the absolute devotion of maternity to its offspring, so long, though _only_ so long, as its assistance is required. A bird feeding her young, a tigress licking her cubs, a mare wheeling round her foal—each of these affords an example of loving care and tenderness, essentially feminine in its utter forgetfulness of self. Each of these squanders such gold as it possesses, the treasure of its deep instinctive affection, on ingratitude and neglect. The nestlings gape with hungry little beaks, when they hear the flap of wings, not to greet the coming provider, but that they may eat and be filled. The cubs huddle themselves up to their mother’s side for warmth and comfort, not for her cruel beauty nor her fierce protecting love. The foal, when it gets on its long legs, will follow your horse or mine as readily as its dam. They take all, to give back nothing in exchange. And no sooner can the bird use its wings, the beast its limbs, than it abandons at once and for ever the parent whose sustaining care is no longer necessary to its existence.