for and unacquainted with danger; his ears are a weathercock
registering the drift of all his petty hopes and fears. I see the left
ear go forward and prepare for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He
knows a wheelbarrow familiarly--there is one in his stall all day--but I
am taking him a road he does not want to go, and so the hypocrite is
going to pretend that barrow is of a dangerous sort. I prepare to apply
a counter-irritant: he sees it with the corner of his eye, and both ears
turn back like a tuning-fork.

The size and quality of the ear serve to show how far the owner depends
on it. You will never begin to understand Nature until you see clearly
that every life is dominated by two supreme anxieties which push aside
all other concerns--viz., to eat, and not to be eaten. The one is
uppermost in those that pursue, and the other in those that flee. Now if
the pursuer fails he loses a dinner, but if the fugitive fails he loses
his life, from which it follows that the very best sort of ears will be
found among those beasts that do not ravage but run.

But there is another matter to be taken into account. The ears are not
the whole of the beast's outfit. It has eyes, and it has a nose. Which
of the three it most relies on depends upon the manner of its life. A
bird lives in trees or the air, looking down at the prowling cat or up
at the hawk hovering in the clear sky; so it does not keep ears, and its
nose is of no account. But what four-footed thing can see like a bird?
The squirrel also lives in the trees, and its ears are frivolously
decorated with tufts of hair. You will not find many beasts that can
afford to prostitute their ears to ornamental purposes. The only other
beast that I can think of at this moment which has tufted ears is the
lynx. Now the lynx is a tree cat, and there is proverbial wisdom in the
saying "Eyes like a lynx."

[Illustration: A GREAT CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF DISTINGUISHED EARS.]

But go to the timid beasts that spend their lives on the ground among
grass and brushwood and woods and coppices, where murderous foes are
prowling unseen, and you will see ears indeed--expansive, tremulous,
turning lightly on well-oiled pivots, and catching, like large
sea-shells, the mingled murmur of rustling leaves and snapping twigs and
chirping insects and falling seeds, and the slight, occasional, abrupt,
fateful sound which is none of these. It is impossible, no doubt, for us
ever to think ourselves into