Yes, the horn winds far and sweet in story and song, until it becomes the horn of elf-land faintly blowing, and man is a carnivorous animal who feeds on flesh. But butchers and fishermen are provided to supply the market. Is the carnivorous formation of man a reason that boys should stone birds or men shoot deer, that we should bait dogs and fight cocks and kill scared pigeons, not for food, but for fun? Foxes may be a pest that should be exterminated, like bears in a frontier country. But when a country is so advanced in settlement and civilization that prosperous gentlemen dress themselves gayly in scarlet coats and buckskin breeches, and ride blooded horses, and follow costly packs of hounds across country hunting a frightened fox, the fox is no longer a pest, and the riders are not frontiersmen and honest settlers; they are butchers, not for a lawful purpose, but for pleasure. Yes; the law solemnly takes life, but the judge who should take life for sport--! Nimrod, despite the winding horn, the human relation to domestic animals that serve us is still barbarous. No man can see what treatment a noble horse, straining and struggling to do his best, often receives from his owner, without wincing at the fate that abandons so fine a creature to so ignoble and cruel a tormentor. But the kindly hand of civilization has at last reached the animals. In Cincinnati there is a statue newly raised to their protector. They will never know him, but the American list of worthies is incomplete in which the name of Henry Bergh is not "writ large." AUTUMN DAYS The "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" comes long before the maples are crimson and the birches yellow. The splendor of the summer is very brief. If it be really hot, July is not over before you may see the leaves slightly shrivelling, and the woods have a half-crisp, curdled aspect. The intense heat of the year gives a sense of violent and rapid struggle, as if all the natural processes were wonderfully accelerated by an access of fever, and the long cool repose of convalescence follows in the clear, bright autumn days. The enjoyment of these things is a kind of test of character. If a man found himself ceasing to take pleasure in the moon and flowers and children--if the red leaf of the fall gave him the same emotion as the green leaf of the spring--he might well feel that he was old and his heart worn out.