ick,
if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural
explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I
came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some
one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work
of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as
dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of
humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not
drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made
us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and
vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and
held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as
Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt
and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had
not even thought of Christian theology.

CHAPTER V.--_The Flag of the World_

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were
called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words
myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea
of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was
that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal
explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could
be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these
statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for
other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought
everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like
calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the
conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the
pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except
himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the
mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little
girl, "An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist
is a man who looks after your feet." I am not sure that this is not the
best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it.
For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that
more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the