and sink
under him, and he, too, never knew a Maytime. Cluxley was always the
belated one and outlived him some three days, but on the fourth morning
she went staggering into the undiscovered realm.

People say, "But you did well to keep your Easter chicken alive
fourteen days. If the truth were known, you would find that very few of
those candy-sale chickens hold out so long as that. We bought one for
the children, but it was dead before Sunday. It is next to impossible
to raise chickens by hand, even with experience. As to the ducklings
that are coming into fashion for Easter gifts, they die sooner than
chickens."

Then to our moral, for Mike's small story surely has a moral, though it
does not matter in the least to Mike. I have no delusions there.

"All men are
Philosophers to their inches,"

but chickens' inches are so very few that there is no room for altruism
in their philosophy. Yet the thought of how much these wee innocents
may suffer from the incompetence of those who so lightly assume their
fostering urges a protest against keeping Easter, the Festival of Life,
by such wanton sacrifice of life. How can we reproach the Spaniards,
who celebrate their Easter by the merciless bullfight, while we permit
this cruelty to tender chickenhood?

A chicken's death is not more trivial than a sparrow's fall. St.
Francis of Assisi would have cared.

But beneath it all lies the old, dark problem of creature existence.
They are so ready to trust and love us, these feathered and furred
companions of ours on the strange, bright star that whirls us all
through the vast of ether to an unknown rhythm, and we, with a lordly
selfishness that scoffs at question, slaughter them for our food and
clothing, hunt them for our sport, make them our drudges in peace and
our victims in war. I can never forget the eyes of a calf that ran to
me from his butcher in Norway,--of a kid that I saw struggling away
from the knife on Passover eve in Palestine. Yet such is the order of
the earth. All carnivorous creatures prey upon the weaker. Water and
wood and field and air are but varying scenes of the unpausing tragedy.
Why, if it must be so, were these doomed animals endowed with the awful
gift of suffering? And what recompense, even in the far reaches of
eternity, can their Creator make to these myriad martyrs for their
griefs and tortures? Is He the God of Hardy's _The Dynasts_, careless
of mortal agonies? Ther