352 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



her offspring; but she turned about her great mother 

 eyes toward it, only to be disappointed and heartbroken. 

 Her lamb had been born dead. 



Thoreau, in his journal ("Winter," February 5, 

 1854), once jotted down a few thoughts upon a musk- 

 rat which are worth reading: 



"Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat, which 

 gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its suffering, but through 

 our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its 

 heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate? F(5r 

 whom are psalms sung and mass said, if not for such worthies 

 as these? When I hear the church organ peal, or feel the 

 trembling tones of the bass-viol, I see in imagination the musk- 

 rat gnawing off his leg. I offer up a note that his affliction 

 may be sanctified to each and all of us. . . . When I think of 

 the tragedies which are constantly permitted in the course of all 

 animal life, they make the plaintive strain of the universal harp 

 which elevates us above the trivial. . . . Even as the 

 worthies of mankind are said to recommend human life by 

 having lived it, so I could not spare the example of the muskrat." 



Dr. W. C. Gray, in a paper upon "The Tragedies 

 in Nature," in his "Musings by Camp-fire and Way- 

 side," has also written of the existence of pain in the 

 animal creation — the owl pursuing the duck, the hawk 

 after the pigeon, the wolves in chase of the doe — but 

 sees in these a benign intention and, after all, an allevi- 

 ation. This is often very beautifully true, and the evil 

 of pain then ceases in its own existence. 



I hate to take the life of a fellow creature; yet I 

 have. And the dripping, sputtering blood, the eyes 

 still beautiful, have wrung my heart, while, neverthe- 



