"I don't think that the poem means that it really did," was my answer. "I think it means that when the poet thought how wonderful a tiger is, with the life and the fierceness shining like a flame in his eyes, and how we cannot tell where that fire came from, and that the stars overhead were scarcely brighter, it seemed as if that was where the green light came from. He was trying to say how wonderful and terrible it was to him,—especially when he thought of coming upon the beast all alone in the forest in the night with nobody near to defend him." The boy was silent, and thinking hard. He had evidently not yet clearly grasped all the idea. "But God didn't make a tiger on an anvil and put pieces of stars in for eyes," he objected. "You told me yesterday that Bruno swims like a duck. He doesn't really, for a duck goes on the top of the water." "Oh, but I meant that Bruno goes as fast as a duck." "And you wanted me to know how well he swims, I suppose." "Why, of course. Bruno can swim twice as fast as Tom Talcott's dog." "You said that about the duck to make me know what a wonderful swimmer Bruno is, and the man who wrote the poem wanted you when you read it to feel how wonderful the tiger seemed to him; its eyes as if they were of fire brought from the stars, its strength so great that it seemed as if his muscles had been beaten out on an anvil from red-hot steel by some Being mighty enough to do something no man could begin to do. The poem doesn't mean that a tiger was really made in this way; but it does mean that when you think of the strength and fearfulness of the creature, able to carry off a man or even a horse in its jaws, this is the best way to give an idea of how terrible the animal seemed." The boy accepted this, and so we came to the fifth verse. The range of ideas here is so much beyond the mind of any child that it was necessary to suggest most of them, to go very slowly, and in the end to be content with a childishly inadequate notion of the magnificent conception. I gave frankly a suggestion of the creation of all the animals at the beginning, and of how the angels might have stood around like stars, watching full of interest and of kindness. The boy was easily made to feel as if he had seen the making of the deer and the lamb and the horse, and of how the angels might see in one or another of the animals a help or a friend to man. "Then suppose," I said, "that the angels should see God make the great tiger, royal and terrible. What would they see?" "Oh, a great fierce thing," the lad returned. "Do you suppose he'd jump right at the deer and the lambs?" "He would make the angels think how he could. How different from the other animals he'd be." "Yes, he'd have big, big, sharp teeth, and he'd lash his tail, and he'd put out his claws. Do you suppose he'd sharpen his claws the way Muff does on the leather chairs?"