Yes, those were his very words! And Alice acknowledges that he made the one recorded above (though I see he has denied it). Such is ever the ruin wrought by love, even in the mind of a philosopher. “By the way,” said Alice, as she stood with her feet upon the gunwale of the Argo, ready to spring, “in the rather mixed metaphors of honest Sam, which of us was the fish and which the hook? ‘Porpoise,’” quoted she, laughing, “I trust I don’t remind you of one?” Charley, who stood in the sand, held one of Alice’s hands in each of his with a degree of pressure entirely incommensurate with the necessities of equilibrium: “✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻” sang he, with a rapt and fatuous smile. “✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ Absence of wings ✻ ✻ ✻ vision ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ eyes beheld.” For, upon my word, the reader must not expect me to transcribe more than a word, here and there, of such jargon. Yet, though my tongue be harsh, I do not in my heart blame Charley; for Alice, at all times a pretty girl, was, just at this moment, as she stood above him with the dark sky for a background, radiantly beautiful in his eyes. And more,— She looked beautiful on purpose. I repeat it,—she did it on purpose. And here, though it is abhorrent to all my art-instincts to break the current of my story with anything like a thought, original or selected,—though I have promised the reader to place before him a succession of pictures merely, without even adding, _This is Daniel_, and, _These are the Lions!_—I feel that I have used an expression requiring an explanation. That explanation I cannot give save through the medium of what—disguise it how I will—wears the semblance of a thought. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization in England,” lays it down that no man can write history without a knowledge of the physical sciences. Now it is equally true that no one can discuss human nature scientifically without an acquaintance with zoology. It is Darwin and the naturalists who have opened up this new field of inquiry; and Comparative Zoological Nature has now become as needful a study to the playwright and novelist as Comparative Anatomy is to the physiologist. For my own part, whenever I would know whether a certain proposition be true of man, I first inquire if it holds good as to the lower animals,—to speak as a man; and in the course of my desultory investigations on this line I have stumbled upon sundry valuable truths. Among the convictions which I have reached in this way is the one which led me to say just now that our pretty little Alice, perched upon the gunwale of the Argo, bethought her of making poor Charley crazy with love, by simply looking very, very beautiful; and did so look accordingly, then and there. Of the mere fact there can be no doubt, since I have Charley’s word for that. [Fact. _C. F._] [Goose! _A. F._] [Who? _J. B. W._] But a scientific explanation of the phenomenon can be given only by a student of Comparative Zoological Nature.