SEE-SAW. 173

me as branches, drinking in life from the life I gave.
Oh miserable me! miserable, despised, useless !”

Now there may be plenty of animals to be found
with more brilliant abilities and livelier imagination
than the snail, but for gravity of demeanour and
calmness of nerve who is his equal? and if a sound
judgment be not behind such outward signs, there
is no faith to be put in faces !

Accordingly, Sir Helix Hortensis—so let us call
him—made no answer at first to the wailings of
the oak. Three times he crawled round it, leaving
three fresh traces of his transit, before he spoke,
his horns turning hither and thither as those won-
derful eyes at the end strove to take in the full
state of the case. And his are not the eyes, you
know, which waste their energies in scatterbrained
staring. He keeps them cool in. their cases till
there is something to be looked at, and. then turns
them inside out to their destined work.

And thus he looked, and he looked, and he
looked, while the children went on shouting, and
the plank went on see-sawing, and the tree went
on groaning ; and as he leoked, he considered.