"The people of an aquarium must surely be fishes, eh, Saffy?" said the father to the bright child, walking hand in hand with him. It was Josephine. Her eyes were so blue that but for the association he would have called her Sapphira. Between the two he contented himself with the pet name of _Saffy_. "Ah but, papa," said Hester, "Corney didn't say the people _of_ the aquarium, but the people _at_ the aquarium!" "Two of you are too many for me!" returned the father playfully. "Well, then, Saffy, let us go and see the people _of_ and the people _at_ the aquarium.--Which do you want to see, Hester?" "Oh, the fishes of course, papa!" "Why of course?" "Because they're so much more interesting than the people," said Hester rebuked in herself as she said it--before she knew why. "Fishes more interesting than people!" exclaimed her father. "They're so like people, papa!" "Oh, then surely the people must be the more interesting after all, if it is the likeness of the fishes to people that makes them interesting! Which of all the people you love do you see likest a fish now?" "Oh, papa!" "What! is it only people you hate that you see like fishes?" "I don't hate anybody, papa." "There's a way of not caring about people, though--looking down on them and seeing them like fishes, that's precious like hating them," said Cornelius, who enjoyed a crowd, and putting his sister in the wrong still better: to that end he could easily say a sensible thing. "If you mean me, Corney, I think you do me injustice," said Hester. "The worst I do is to look at them the wrong way of the telescope." "But why do you never see anyone you love like a fish?" persisted her father. "Perhaps because I could not love anybody that was like a fish." "Certainly there is something not beautiful about them!" said Mr. Raymount. "They're beastly ugly," said Cornelius. "Let us look into it a little," continued his father. "What is it about them that is ugly? Their colors are sometimes very beautiful--and their shapes, too." "Their heads and faces," said Hester, "are the only parts of them in which they can be like human beings, and those are very ugly." "I'm not sure that you are right, Hester," said the mother, who had not spoken till now. "There must surely be something human in their bodies as well, for now and then I see their ways and motions so like those of men and women, that I felt for a moment almost as if I understood how they were feeling, and were just going to know what they were thinking." "I suspect," said Mr. Raymount, "your mother's too much of a poet to be trusted alone in an aquarium. It would have driven Shelley crazy--to judge from his Sensitive Plant."