THE GAME OF DEATH 251 



in an ordinary day's work to have an arm blown off. 

 If that is so for man, self-conscious to a perfectly 

 absurd degree, how much more must it be with the 

 animals, which, if self-conscious at all, must be quite 

 healthily so ? They can no more be as imaginative 

 or so tender-hearted as we are than the back-woods- 

 man can be physically as tender as the overcomfort- 

 able townsman. 



The ignoble, unseen enemy of slow approach does 

 cause the animal -a sort of misery. There are few 

 sadder sights than a diseased rabbit. It seems almost 

 as though it must brood on its misfortune, an unjust 

 and undeserved misfortune as the human sufferer 

 usually accounts it. Job was more than human not 

 to rail at his boils, which he knew or felt to be a 

 wanton infliction. Yesterday, a mouse crossed our 

 path ever so slowly, and when we caught it we found 

 that it was afflicted by huge ticks as big in com- 

 parison as if so many rats hung and sucked on a 

 man. It must have suffered days of misery, each as 

 acute as the moment wherein a mouse is caught and 

 killed by a weasel. It had never seen, perhaps not 

 even felt externally, the things that were sapping its 

 life. No other mouse could tell it what was the 

 matter, yet we cannot doubt that here was carking, 

 brooding care as unlike a run for life as the despair 

 of a Chatterton is unlike a shot through the heart in 

 a glorious breach. 



We can bear the severest lot with fortitude and a 

 smile, when it is the common lot and when it comes 

 from an enemy that is entirely an enemy. Man who 

 pities the animals, perhaps overmuch, for what hap- 

 pens to them in the open field, where the loss of one 



