huretted hydrogen?" We heard and we pitied.
We let her in and housed her royally; we adorned her palace
with re-agents and retorts, and made it a very charnel-house
of bones, and we cried to our undergraduates, "The feast of
Science is spread! Eat, drink, and be happy!" But they would
not. They fingered the bones, and thought them dry. They
sniffed at the hydrogen, and turned away. Yet for all that
Science ceased not to cry, "More gold, more gold!" And her
three fair daughters, Chemistry, Biology, and Physics (for
the modern horse-leech is more prolific than in the days of
Solomon), ceased not to plead, "Give, give!" And we gave; we
poured forth our wealth like water (I beg her pardon, like
H{_2}O), and we could not help thinking there was something
weird and uncanny in the ghoul-like facility with which she
absorbed it.

The curtain rises on the second act of the drama. Science is
still weeping, but this time it is for lack of pupils, not
of teachers or machinery. "We are unfairly handicapped!" she
cries. "You have prizes and scholarships for classics and
mathematics, and you bribe your best students to desert us.
Buy us some bright, clever boys to teach, and then see what
we can do!" Once more we heard and pitied. We had bought her
bones; we bought her boys. And now at last her halls were
filled--not only with teachers paid to teach, but also with
learners paid to learn. And we have not much to complain of
in results, except that perhaps she is a little too ready to
return on our hands all but the "honour-men"--all, in fact,
who really need the helping hand of an educator. "Here, take
back your stupid ones!" she cries. "Except as subjects for
the scalpel (and we have not yet got the Human Vivisection
Act through Parliament) we can do nothing with them!"

The third act of the drama is yet under rehearsal; the
actors are still running in and out of the green-room, and
hastily shuffling on their new and ill-fitting dresses; but
its general scope is not far to seek. At no distant day our
once timid and tearful guest will be turning up her nose at
the fare provided for her. "Give me no more youths to
teach," she will say; "but pay me handsomely, and let me
think. Plato and Aristotle were all very well in their way;
Diogenes and his tub for me!" The allusion is not