e clever. The transition from the joint government of the world
by a herd of wily foxes to the domination of the universe by the mammoth
ox is marked by the increase of clumsy strength and the disappearance of
graceful deception."

"That is true; but the graceful deception continues to be the more
interesting, if not the more agreeable. As for me, I would rather be
gracefully deceived, as you call it, than pounded to jelly by the hoofs
of the mammoth,--unless I could be the mammoth myself."

"To return to Patoff," said I, "what are they going to do with him?"

"The question is much more likely to be what he will do with them, I
should say," answered the scientist, looking straight before him, and
increasing the speed of his walk. "I am not at all sure what he might
do, if no one prevented him. He is capable of considerable originality
if left to himself, and they follow him up there at the Place as the
boys and girls followed the Pied Piper."

"Is he at all like his mother?" I asked.

"In point of originality?" inquired the professor, with a curious smile.
"She was certainly a most original woman. I hardly know whether he is
like her. Boys are said to resemble their mother in appearance and their
father in character. He is certainly not of the same type of
constitution as his mother, he has not even the same shape of head, and
I am glad of it. But his father was a Slav, and what is madness in an
Englishwoman is sanity in a Russian. Her most extraordinary aberrations
might not seem at all extraordinary when set off by the natural violence
he inherits from his father."

"That is a novel idea to me," I remarked. "You mean that what is madness
in one man is not necessarily insanity in another; besides, you refused
to allow this morning that Madame Patoff was crazy."

"I did not refuse to allow it; I only said I did not know it to be the
case. But as for what I just said, take two types of mankind, a Chinese
and an Englishman, for instance. If you met a fair-haired, blue-eyed,
sanguine Englishman, whose head and features were shaped precisely like
those of a Chinaman, you could predicate of him that he must be a very
extraordinary creature, capable, perhaps, of becoming a driveling idiot.
The same of a Chinese, if you met one with a brain shaped like that of
an Englishman, and similar features, but with straight black hair, a
yellow skin, and red eyes. He would have the brain of the Anglo-Saxon
with the temperament of