eet air stirred
the sweet hay of the nest, and life called you from your dreaming to
awake, and join it in its interplay. And now! You might have
been--what might you not have been? A prize hen, fountain of a
broadening stream of hens, chicks, dozens of chicks, hundreds of
chicks, a surging ocean of chickens. Had you been hatched among the
early Victorian chickens that were, I presume, your contemporaries, by
now you might have been a million fowl, and the delight and support of
hundreds of thousands of homes. You might have been worth thousands of
pounds and have eaten corn by the ton. They might have written
articles about you in half-crown reviews and devoted poultry farms to
your sole support. And instead you have been narrowed down to this
sordid back-street tragedy, a mere offence, tempting a struggling
tradesman to risk the honour of my patronage of his books, for a paltry
fraction of a pennyworth of profit. Why, I ask you, were you not
hatched? Was it lack of courage? a fear of the unknown dangers that
lie outside the shell?

"An indescribable pity wells up in me for this lost egg, this dead end
in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving
amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile
ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this
egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of
life had split and rushed by on either side of it. And you might,"
cried he, turning to the egg again, "have been a Variety, a novelty,
and an improvement in chickens. No chick now will ever be _exactly_
the chick you might have been. Only an Olive Schreiner could do full
justice to your failure, you poor nun, you futile eremite, you absolute
and hopeless impasse. Was it, I ask again, a lack of courage?

"Perhaps a lack of opportunity? It may be you stirred and hoped in the
distant past, and the warmth to quicken you never came. Ambition may
have fretted you. Indeed, now I think of it, there is something in the
flavour of you, singularly suggestive of disappointed ambition. In
literature, and more particularly in criticism, I can assure you I have
met the very fellow of your quality, from literary rotten eggs whose
opening came too late. They are like the genii in the 'Arabian Nights'
whom Solomon, the son of David, sealed in the pot. At first he
promised infinite delights to his discoverer--and his discoverer
lagged. In the