he title. It only remained to
select the things, and the book was done. I set to work at once, and in
a very little while my bibelot was selected. There were dedications
fulsome and fluid, dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in
verse and dedications in the dead languages: all sorts and conditions of
dedications, even the simple "To J.H. Gabbles"--so suggestive of the
modest white stones of the village churchyard. Altogether I picked out
one hundred and three dedications. At last only one thing remained to
complete the book. And that was--the Dedication. You will scarcely
credit it, but that worries me still....

I am almost inclined to think that Dedications are going out of
fashion.

THROUGH A MICROSCOPE

SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS

This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera and obtained a
microscope--a short, complacent-looking implement it is, of brass--and
he goes about everywhere now with little glass bottles in his pocket,
ready to jump upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it home
and pry into its affairs. Within his study window are perhaps half a
dozen jars and basins full of green scum and choice specimens of black
mud in which his victims live. He persists in making me look through
this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It seems to me a kind
of impropriety even when I do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop
of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and,
of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on
living just as they did before they were observed. It makes me feel at
times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such
creature.

Certainly there are odd things enough in the water. Among others,
certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of
the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every
now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off
with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The
dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants--_Algae_ he
calls them, for some reason--to disgorge themselves in this way and go
swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things. If the
lower plants, why not the higher? It may be my abominable imagination,
but since he told me about these--swarm spores I think he called
them--I don't feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.