no
more consideration than to keep casting old debts in my bill, I might
stretch a point in order to be rid of you," the stork said, sighing.

"Now, but surely," Manuel considered, "you might be a little more
cheerful about this matter."

"And why should I, of all the birds that go about the heavens, be
cheerful?"

"Well, somehow one expects a reasonable gaiety in you who bring hilarity
and teething-rings into so many households--"

The stork answered:

"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and therewith I,
they say, bring joy. Now of the joy I bring to the mother let none
speak, for miracles are not neatly to be caged in sentences, nor is
truth always expedient. To the father I bring the sight of his own life,
by him so insecurely held, renewed and strengthened in a tenement not
yet impaired by time and folly: he is no more disposed to belittle
himself here than elsewhere; and it is himself that he cuddles in this
small, soft, incomprehensible and unsoiled incarnation. For, as I bring
the children, they have no evil in them and no cowardice and no guile.

"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, when later I
return, to those that yesterday were children. And in all ways time has
marred, and living has defaced, and prudence has maimed, until I grieve
to entrust that which I bring to what remains of that which yesterday I
brought. In the old days children were sacrificed to a brazen burning
god, but time affects more subtile hecatombs: for Moloch slew outright.
Yes, Moloch, being divine, killed as the dog kills, furiously, but time
is that transfigured cat, an ironist. So living mars and defaces and
maims, and living appears wantonly to soil and to degrade its prey
before destroying it.

"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and I leave them
to endure that which is fated. Daily I bring into this world the beauty
and innocence and high-heartedness and faith of children: but life has
no employment, or else life has no sustenance, for these fine things
which I bring daily, for always I, returning, find the human usages of
living have extinguished these excellences in those who yesterday were
children, and that these virtues exist in no aged person. And I would
that Jahveh had created me an eagle or a vulture or some other hateful
bird of prey that furthers a less grievous slaying and a more
intelligible wasting than I further."

To this, Dom Manuel replied, in tha