ne to his stiffly-curving neck. Later, with
increasing stature, we came to overlook his merits as a beast of
burden; but how frankly, how good-naturedly, he had recognized the new
conditions, and adapted himself to them without a murmur!

When the military spirit was abroad, who so ready to be a squadron of
cavalry, a horde of Cossacks, or artillery pounding into position? He
had even served with honour as a gun-boat, during a period when naval
strategy was the only theme; and no false equine pride ever hindered him
from taking the part of a roaring locomotive, earth-shaking, clangorous,
annihilating time and space. Really it was no longer clear how life,
with its manifold emergencies, was to be carried on at all without a
fellow like the spotty horse, ready to step in at critical moments and
take up just the part required of him.

In moments of mental depression, nothing is quite so consoling as the
honest smell of a painted animal; and mechanically I turned towards the
shelf that had been so long the Ararat of our weather-beaten Ark.
The shelf was empty, the Ark had cast off moorings and sailed away
to Poplar, and had taken with it its haunting smell, as well as that
pleasant sense of disorder that the best conducted Ark is always able to
impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There
was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk,
taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our
motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and
only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop,
flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves again. I
think that none of us ever really thought very much of Ham and Shem and
Japhet. They were only there because they were in the story, but
nobody really wanted them. The Ark was built for the animals, of
course--animals with tails, and trunks, and horns, and at least three
legs apiece, though some unfortunates had been unable to retain even
that number. And in the animals were of course included the birds--the
dove, for instance, grey with black wings, and the red-crested
woodpecker--or was it a hoo-poe?--and the insects, for there was a dear
beetle, about the same size as the dove, that held its own with any of
the mammalia.

Of the doll-department Charlotte had naturally been sole chief for a
long time; if the staff were not in their places to-day, it was not I
who had