'Oh father!' cried the child, 'don't touch it, it is alive!'

   'Nonsense!' said the professor, 'it is as dead as a door-nail. Just reach me that lens.'

   He raised the glass stopper unsuspiciously, then turned to adjust his instrument And even as he turned his captive fled.

   'There!' cried the boy.

   Like a flash of sunshine, Queen Mab darted upwards and floated through the open window. They saw her hover outside a moment, then she was gone—back into her deathless ether.

   'I told you so!' exclaimed the poet, startled by this incident into a momentary conviction of the truth of his own theory.

   Moved by an uncontrollable impulse, they all three rushed out into the garden; and far beyond them, in the sunlight, they did indeed catch one parting gleam of gauzy wings, as the fairy vanished. When the professor led the way into the room again, and, rather crestfallen, looked at the tall empty bottle and the stopper, which in his hurry he had thrown down upon the floor.

   'She is gone!' sobbed the child. 'My beautiful Dala. I shall never see her again.'

   He was right; the professor and the theologian, between them, had scared Queen Mab away pretty successfully. She would certainly never revisit that part of the city if she could help it. The divine looked uncomfortable. In spite of himself he had recognised something strange and unusual in the appearance of this last capture of his friend's butterfly-net, and almost unconsciously he began to ponder on the old theory that the Evil One might occasionally disguise himself as an angel of light. The poet, meanwhile, was more voluble.

   'Your soul is sordid!' he said indignantly to the professor. 'You have no eyes for the Immaterial, the intangibly Ideal, that lies behind the shadowy and deceptive veil that we call Matter.'

   'My soul,' said the professor with equal indignation, 'that is, if I have got one, is as good as yours.'

   'No, it isn't,' said the poet; 'I am all soul, or nearly all. You are nothing but a mass of Higher Protoplasm.'

   'No one need wish to be anything better. I should like to know,' cried the professor angrily, 'where we should all be without Protoplasm.'

   'My friends,' said the theologian, still rather 

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