There is not a person living who has not done an act of cruelty. It is impossible to refrain from it. However kindly the soul may be Nature will whisper bloody messages; and some day there is sure to be a temporary breakdown. In a town the wretched business is not much seen. It lurks in the dark corners, like the Mygale spider, and comes out perhaps at moonlight to cast its shadow upon the bed. On the sparsely inhabited moor it is visible, for it cannot hide away so easily, and it tries less because it is fiercer. It is like the wolf-spider which dashes out in a mad fury. Upon a wild upland passions are fiercer, just as physical strength is greater. Everything seems to suggest the dark end of the scale; the rain is more furious, the clouds are blacker, the wind is mightier, the rivers are colder; Nature is at full strength. She is wild and lawless, and men are often wild and lawless too. Tender lilies would not live upon the moor, and it is no use looking for them. They are down in the valleys. Upon the moor there is the granite, the spiny gorse, the rugged heather. It is no use looking for the qualities of the lily in those men who are made of the granite, and gorse, and heather. Pendoggat was the sort of man who might have melted into tears at hearing a violin played, and then have kicked the performer down a wheal if he asked for a copper. Nature turns out a lot of contradictory work like that. She never troubles to fit the joints together. Had any one told Pendoggat he was a cruel man, he would first of all have stunned the speaker into silence, and then have wondered whatever the man had been driving at. It is a peculiarity of cruelty that it does not comprehend cruelty. No argument will persuade a rabbit-trapper that the wretched animals suffer in the iron jaws of his traps. The man who skins an eel alive, and curses it because it won't keep still, cannot be brought to understand that he is doing anything inhuman. Perhaps he will admit he had never given the subject a thought; more probably he will regard the apostle of mercy as a madman. The only way to enlighten such men is to skin them alive, or compel them to tear themselves to death in an iron trap; and there are, unfortunately, laws to prevent that. The only just law ever made was the _lex talionis_, and Nature recognises that frequently. Pendoggat trapped rabbits in his fields, and if they were not dead when he found them he left them as a rule. The traps were supposed to kill them in time, and the longer they were in dying the longer their flesh would keep. That was the way he looked at it. Quite a practical way.