time of living.

In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at this matter in another
light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains.
In that case the amoeba I look at may have crawled among the slime of
the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself and the royal
family was an unassuming mud-fish like those in the reptile house in the
Zoo. His memoirs would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint
to one's meditations. If the dabbler wash him off this slide into his
tube of water again, this trivial creature may go on feeding and growing
and dividing, and presently be thrown away to wider waters, and so
escape to live ... after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten,
after our Empire has passed away, after the human animal has passed
through I know not what vicissitudes. It may be he will still, with the
utmost nonchalance, be pushing out his pseudopodia, and ingesting
diatoms when the fretful transitory life of humanity has passed
altogether from the earth. One may catch him in specimen tubes by the
dozen; but still, when one thinks of this, it is impossible to deny him
a certain envious, if qualified, respect.

And all the time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little
lives; in this drop of water they are being watched by a creature of
whose presence they do not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence
with a stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and sometimes
as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as themselves. He sees them, and
they do not see him, because he has senses they do not possess, because
he is too incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an overwhelming
catastrophe, into their lives. Even so, it may be, the dabbler himself
is being curiously observed.... The dabbler is good enough to say that
the suggestion is inconceivable. I can imagine a decent amoeba saying
the same thing.

THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING

Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor, on the score of
their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous
sympathy to go a Toynbee-Halling in their cause. And Sir Walter Besant
once wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things, how
monotonous life was there. That is your modern fallacy respecting the
lower middle class. One might multiply instances. The tenor of the pity
is always the same.

"No music," says the cultivated man, "no pictures, no books to read n