OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN 



As usual he evoked a great deal of undeserved sympathy 

 meanwhile his tactful family held their peace. 

 Bettine is growing into the hobbledehoy stage. A few 

 weeks ago it was an entrancing spectacle to see her 

 playing with a butterfly on the moor. It was a yellow 

 butterfly, and we think it must have understood the rules 

 of catch-who-catch-can, for it fluttered along just ahead 

 of the white puppy's nose. It was a little vision of youth 

 and spring to snapshot for the gallery of mental memories. 

 Loki's female relations, who are given to transcendental 

 discussions, sometimes wonder whether in the next world 

 they will be vouchsafed these dear small pleasures which 

 make up the best of life down here. Unless we find our 

 animals there, there will certainly be something missing. 

 Surely there are flowers in Heaven, and birds why not 

 those faithful creatures in which a soul seems so often 

 struggling into birth ? 



" My little god, my little god ! " Maeterlinck makes the 

 dog say to his master. It is certain that man, in making 

 the dog his companion, has in some sort endowed him 

 with spiritual faculties. And it is this piteously loving, 

 confiding, blindly adoring, dumb creature that has been 

 selected by the " master minds " of the day as the chief 

 victim for the horrors of scientific research ! 

 Indeed, that humanity should thus use its God-given 

 dominion over the helpless lower order of creation is an 

 idea so hideous that it can only have emanated from the 

 Powers of Darkness. All the glib arguments that this 

 animal torture benefits suffering man seem to us as much 

 beside the mark as they are immoral. Almost every crime 

 can be justified by some such theoiy, from the century-old 

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