Appearances and Disappearances.

Brooding over our caged cousins, who sacrifice outer appearances for inner disappearances, it seems to me that, taken with a drop of eau-de-Cologne, they are not any more unpleasant to the naked eye than some of the later and more vertical models. Whatever they are they are what they are, and if happiness means ignorance of what happiness means, they must all be happy. In any case the basis of happiness seems to be as elastic as the plython of a python or the average conscience.

Man is not happy, because he has appointed himself the judge of all things except himself, and he floats in an atmosphere of his own vapouring in a balloon blown up with his own air, and his landing-ground is his own dust. It is a question whether he is the big pea in the horticultural holocaust or a victim of his own vicariousness.

If contentment is the purse for Life's Handicap, then the pig flies in, and the pug misses by a short nose; the boaconstrictor's content is cubic content, and the leopard is happy in spots. Speaking zoo-logically, I confess that:

Whenever I attend the zoo,
And contemplate the varied crew,
Respectively and in the mass,
I feel contrained to brood, alas,
That only accident of birth,
Prevents me rooting in the earth,
Or gliding round in aqueous ease,
Beneath exotic tropic seas,
Or leaping o'er the mountain slopes,
Like kangaroos or antelopes.
The fact that I was born to sin,
And shave the shavings off my chin,
And try to exercise my will,

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Has made me what I am, but still
I think the polar bear is cute,
And so are both the nit and newt;
The pelican is also quaint,
The skunk is bright despite his taint,
The dromedary's not a chump,
Although he's always got the hump.
I often envy little fish,
And think their tails are awf'ly swish—
Of course it must be dull to park,
Indefinitely in a shark.
I watch the chimpanzee at play.
The mustang masticating hay,
The wart-hog watering his warts,
The nautilus notating noughts,
The elephant who packs his trunk,
The penguins—always slightly drunk—
The reptiles sleeping in a bunch,
Recovering from last week's lunch;
Flamingos on their painted stilts,
Resembling Scots without their kilts;
The merry monk, the musty mink—
They all combine to make me think
That though we've learnt to wash with soap,
And fill our heads with dismal dope,
We're justified to take the view
That, when we made our own debut,
We might have been a monk or mole,
A salamander or a sole,
And lived contented on the earth,
Despite The Accident Of Birth.