She sat up quickly, looking at me in amazement.

"Whatever are you talking about?" said she.

"That cormorant," I replied—"in the midst of those gulls."

"But I thought a cormorant was a man who ate too much."

"So he is—he's a bird as well."

"But we call those billy-divers."

"It would make no difference if you called them English gentlemen," said I.

She began to try and think it out; but in the midst of her meditation, she saw a rabbit sitting on an ant-hill, brushing its nose.

"Look—there's a rabbit," she whispered. "Look at his little white tail! And there's another—further on. Why, there are hundreds of them!"

I followed the direction of her finger, and sure enough there were two rabbits.

"I wonder why it is permissible," I began, "for a woman to talk in hundreds of what she only sees in twos?"

"Well—I expect there are hundreds," said Bellwattle.

I admitted the truth of every word she said.

"If there are two rabbits, there are bound to be hundreds," said I. "It's the nature of the beast."

"The creatures!" she exclaimed, suddenly finding it in her heart to be mother unto all of them.

"The only thing I regret," I continued, "is that I can't see them with such generosity of sight as you do."

She closed that one eye again, the eye that betokens her suspicion, and looked at me. When I betrayed nothing, she lay back on her bed of heather roots once more and at that moment the lark shot up from his tuft of sea-grass and went soaring away and away—up into the still blue of the vault of heaven.

There is nothing in life quite to equal it, that song and flight of the lark; nothing quite so magnificent in its simplicity. If the grandeur of monarchy were as simple as this, there would be 

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