half-an-hour to please and pacify this
uncomfortable child. The character and appearance of this infant, so
utterly unlike all its companions, had already excited my curiosity,
but I had found no opportunity of asking a question without risking an
impertinence. On this occasion, however, I ventured to make some
remark on the extreme gentleness and forbearance with which not only
Eveena but the children treated their peevish and exacting brother.

"He is no brother of theirs," said Zulve, the mistress of the house.
"You would hardly find in any family like ours a child with so
irritable a temper or a disposition so selfish, and nowhere a creature
so hardly treated by Nature in body as well as mind."

"Indeed," I said, hardly understanding her answer.

"No," said my host. "It is the rule to deprive of life, promptly and
painlessly, children to whom, from physical deformity or defect, life
is thought unlikely to be pleasant, and whose descendants might be a
burden to the public and a cause of physical deterioration to the
race. It is, however, one of the exceptional tenets to which I have
been obliged to allude, that man should not seek to be wiser than
Nature; and that life should neither be cut short, except as a
punishment for great crimes, nor prolonged artificially contrary to
the manifest intention, or, as our philosophers would say, the common
course of Nature. Those who think with me, therefore, always
endeavour, when we hear in time of their approaching fate, to preserve
children so doomed. Precautions against undue haste or readiness to
destroy lives that might, after all, grow up to health and vigour are
provided by law. No single physician or physiologist can sign a
death-warrant; and I, though no longer a physician by craft, am among
the arbiters, one or more of whom must be called in to approve or
suspend the decision. On these occasions I have rescued from
extinction several children of whose unfitness to live, according to
the standard of the State Nurseries, there was no question, and placed
them in families, mostly childless, that were willing to receive them.
Of this one it was our turn to take charge; and certainly his chance
is better for being brought up among other children, and under the
influence of their gentler dispositions and less exacting
temperaments."

"And is such ill-temper and selfishness," I asked, "generally found
among the deformed?"

"I don't think," replied Esmo, "that this chi