‘’This animal, gentlemen,’ said he, ’is considerable tired, for I’ve been a workin’ on him mighty hard to-day.  He knows that he’s done his work for the night, and I wouldn’t go in with him again for a fifty-dollar bill, but I shall do it, seeing I’ve got such distinguished company,’ and he made a sweeping obeisance, comprehending the giant, the dwarf, and my humble person.

’The performance was really quite remarkable; but I was more interested in observing my fellow visitors.  The dwarf looked up with her bright little eyes, and the giant looked down with his great leaden ones, while the bear jumped over the man’s head, and pretended to fight him and hug him, and finally, walking on his hind-feet, stooped down, and took his head into the horrid cavern of those great jaws.  Out of breath, and red in the face, the enthusiastic operator wound up by plucking a handful of long hair from the flank of the much-enduring creature, and presented it to us, as a souvenir of our visit.’

’I say, when he had him in his mouth, it was ‘bear and forbear,’ wasn’t it?’ put in that scapegrace, Tom, who is always doing something of the sort.

’Silence! and don’t interrupt the court, unless you can say something better than that.  Well, let me tell you, I have been in very genteel society, without feeling any thing so human, so catholic, so pantheistical, (in the right sense,) as I did in making one of that queer company.  The great lout of a giant, with not soul enough in him to fill out his circumference; the sad little dwarf, with not room enough for hers; the poor, patient, necromanted savage of a bear; the smart, steely, grog-loving, praise-loving keeper; the curious, bookish, indolent traveler.  Expressions, all of the grand, never-weary Life-Intention, how widely variant! yet all children, and equally beloved, of the Infinite Father.

’In four of the five cases, it should seem, the creative energy had set about to fashion its supposed ultimate and perfect work, and with what result?  At first blush, the failure seemed most conspicuous in my companions, especially the big and the little one; but a small introspection might, perhaps, have disclosed a deeper disappointment in a nobler aim.  The bear was the only success among us.  He was perfect in his line, though sadly at a disadvantage; ravished from his forest-world, and bedeviled with alien civilization.  And note (as that splendid prig, Ruskin, would say) with what mathematical accuracy nature, in her less ambitious essays, goes to the proposed end.  The bee’s flight—­a specimen wonder—­is not straighter than her course.  In her lower business, she needs no backers.  Meddling only monsters her.  It is only when she comes to the grand, resulting combination, for which she has so long been fussing and preparing—­when she tries her hand (’her ‘prentice han’, I fear,) on man, that she falters, hesitates, and lastly compromises for something lamentably less than she bargained for.