ages of his ordeal were painfully apparent to us. He had become the diaphanous wraith of a fish; his emaciated body was almost translucent; there was nothing left of him except head, speckles, and indomitable spirit.

I have always been an advocate of open plumbing, and my advocacy was now justified. We carried our bathtub outdoors. We filled it with pure water from a neighbor's well that never goes dry. Tenderly, we placed Nathan in his new ocean; we gave him a whole fleet of crickets and grasshoppers that worked their walking-beams with provocative, propulsive force; but Nathan the Wise, with slowly moving fins and weakly pulsing gills, took no notice of them; and we decided that it was part of his wisdom not to gorge himself on an empty stomach, or perhaps he was delicate about eating before so large an audience.

We, however, suffered no such scruples; and, leaving Nathan with high hopes, we dressed to attend a large supper-party at an opulent neighbor's who has an artesian well on his place, a ridiculous affair that you could n't hang even a cream-jar in. Afterwards, we walked home under the stars; and by their dim light, we could descry Nathan, still breathing in the depths of his sea. In the fleet of crickets and grasshoppers, anchored close together, there was now no motion of walkingbeam or paddle-wheel. Fires were evidently banked, and steam was down. for the night. Next morning, we found that the vital steam was down in Nathan's breast, that his fires were out forever, unless, if the hope be not impious, they are rekindled in some Devonian Paradise.

Poor Nathan, stiff, stark, was lying in the bottom of the bath-tub, with his pale, pathetic belly turned uppermost

in an attitude that I am sure he would have considered indecorous. He had made no outcry; no one heard his last words, if he spoke any. Personally, I believe he did not speak any. I believe that he died as he had lived, inarticulate, a martyr to duty, like a true New Englander. And the pity of it is that if we had been a tithe as faithful to him as he was to us, he would be living now, developing into the very patriarch of trout, with an ever increasing stock of experience which he would distill into an ever-deepening silence.

Of course, soon after Nathan's death the rain descended, the floods came, and our well filled again with living water, living in more senses than one; for we again found pale, amorphous rain-worms in our water-bucket. We accepted these meekly, however, as less than the just punishment for our neglect. They will be a continuing punishment and a continuing reminder of Nathan. We have resolved never to have another fish.

Weeks afterward, it suddenly flashed across us that we had missed an unexampled opportunity to turn defeat into a glorious victory. While I was fruitlessly rescuing Nathan from the bottom of the well, right under my nose, right before my eyes, right within my grasp, there was something more precious and more fabulous than the pot of gold at the rainbow's foot. Truth was at the bottom of the well; but I failed to spy it out or smell it out or grasp it. A single thought, a single movement, and I could have come up that ladder laden with a heritage richer than Plutus' mine. Poor, panting man was never so near Eternal Verity before. And now, it's under thirty feet of water! All we can do is live in the hope that there may be another drought this summer.

that well-dressed people are mostly fools, that servants are dishonest, that whoever wears a ready-made tie is not a gentleman, that doctors are ignoramuses, that eating smoked herring is vulgar. But these are prejudices. Not at all; by any fair test they better deserve the name of ultimate convictions than the ambitious articles of faith with which we began. And the test is simply this: on which set of convictions do men act? Plainly on the second. Your believer in immortality will cheerfully imperil his soul through a long lifetime, your fanatic of the relativity of knowledge will be completely irate in discussion with a dogmatist, your advocate of the unknowable, if entrusted with power, would conscientiously proclaim, "The Unknowable or the sword.'

In short, these ambitious categories are not, properly speaking, convictions at all, but mere simulacra thereof. They are emblems, not principles. We would willingly die for them, just as the predatory politician will honestly yearn to die for his country's flag; but Heaven keep us from the folly of living by our ultimate convictions! Such is the unspoken prayer of most sensible people who reserve their creeds for Sunday or election-day use. A rather plain-spoken person, Geoffrey Chaucer, once wrote, For Plato saieth, whoso can him rede, The word mote be accordant to the dede.

We should then be following two eminent truth-tellers should we degrade most metaphysical, theological, and political formulas from their false estate of convictions to that of intermittently recurrent prejudices. To complete the demonstration, we need only show that the real ultimate convictions are invariably acted on. You may make a Christian Scientist out of a Jesuit, but hardly a sausage-eater out of a sausage-hater. Nor shall you win to friendly association with Germans one whose axiom it is that they

are nasty. Many persons call in a physician as an expected social form, and habitually disregard his advice. In fact, a true medicophobe will gladly pay a fee for the pleasure of flouting his doctor. At every point we shall find that the test of action will prove what we commonly call prejudices to be our genuine and most intimate convictions.

In great as in small affairs this truth holds. We know a business man who after careful scrutiny of an enterprise was on the point of a large investment. Hearing casually that the promoter's cheeks were adorned with side-whiskers, the capitalist brushed the project aside. He knew that no luck could come of association with a man who wore 'weepers.' Indeed, experience had taught him that such persons were not merely inauspicious, but positively untrustworthy. At the risk of anticlimax the present writer must avow that, saving the case of very ancient clergymen, he has absolutely no confidence in the taste or morals of any person wearing congress gaiters. Of course such a conviction, being based on a sound analogy between elasticity in principles and in footgear, is not to be confused with the more irrational sort of ultimate convictions. But at bottom the reason hardly comes in. We simply feel and act in a certain way, and that is all there is of it. We dig our last ditches where we please, and not where any moral Vauban dictates. The chaste Lucretia, it will be recalled, because of the outrage of Tarquin, killed herself. This certainly looks like the working of a transcendental ultimate conviction. Yet we should not forget that it is quite possible that the chaste Lucretia would equally have killed herself if her husband had persistently required her to eat mutton, if indeed, in proper resentment of such persecution, she had not killed him.

Shortsighted people will feel that

this reversal, by which, according word with deed, our prejudices become our convictions, somehow degrades human nature. To which the answer is, first, that the truth is no respecter of persons; and next, the counter-query, Does it degrade? On the contrary it exalts. By an instinctive altruism we dig our last ditches where they will endanger few but ourselves. If the theological and political creeds which we profess really guided our conduct, New York soon would be a new Constantinople, with massacre hanging on the presence or absence of a grammatical prefix. To build your ultimate convictions too high is socially dangerous. The man who stands on his notion of the substance or essence of divinity will appeal to the fagots if he may; the man who would perish before eating snails or frogs' legs is content with a subjective superiority. In fact, while dissent is only an offense to our philosophical and churchly prejudices, it is actually a salve to our ultimate convictions. We pride ourselves in those who vulgarly breakfast on smoked herring; they are our background, the conspicuous evidence of our own gentle tastes. It might seem that some Providence had deliberately set our more rigid principles in the field of the wholly inconsequential, in order that men might differ without hating. Lest, influenced by reason, we should act too unreasonably, a great gulf has wisely been established between the proud heights of reason and the pleasant table-land of our ultimate convictions.

OF WALKING

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SITTING ON FENCES

WALKING is fundamentally a matter of boots. Nay, friend, I do not mean top-boots, but boots in the sense of the English, who, being most perfectly

enfranchised for walking, have thence the right to name the gear in which they travel. But I do not here discourse of fine details. So the boot fit, the sole be adequate, and the heel not loftily inclined, choose your own wear, and you shall know content. There be that favor rubber heels, and here again each man is his own arbiter; yet this, at least, is not to be forgotten or lightly overpassed: there is a tang in the sharp crunch of a hard heel on fair road-metal that greets not him who goes delicately on rubber. Let temperament decide.

Most men walk merely to arrive. To such the right flavor of walking is not known; though chance may reveal to them the unsuspected good, and so kindle a longing for the proper bliss of the walker. The true pedestrian knows that the means is itself an end. Not for him 'so many miles and then begins the actual business,' but 'so many miles of utterly fulfilled content'; and if at the road's end he find some pleasant hostelry, with fire and food and all manner of cheer, this is but the fair setting of the stone, not the gem's perfect self. Not that the walker scorns good entertainment, or fair weather, or congenial fellowship. His feet are on the earth; he is no detached dreamer; and all these things may be accounted part and parcel of his pleasure without disloyalty to the pedestrian creed.

Walking is not merely moving two legs rhythmically over certain intervals of ground. It is the primal and the only way to know the world, the deliberate entering into an inheritance, whose parts are wind and weather, sky and prospect, men and animals, and all vital enjoyment. The bicycle has some advantages in point of speed, but it is a foe to observation. All carriages, whether propelled by horse or motor, destroy all feeling of achievement. The