“Why not?  I must live, and my father too; and it is as honest a way of making money as any other:  I poach in no man’s manor for my game.”

“But what is your game!  What possible attraction in that bit of dirt can make men spend their money on it?”

“You shall see,” said Tom, dropping it into the phial of salt water, and offering it to Elsley, with his pocket magnifier.

“Judge for yourself.”

Elsley did so, and beheld a new wonder—­a living plant of crystal, studded with crystal bells, from each of which waved a crown of delicate arms.  It was the first time that Elsley had ever seen one of those exquisite zoophytes which stud every rock and every tuft of weed.

“This is most beautiful,” said he at length.  “Humph! why should not Mr. Vavasour write a poem about it?”

“Why not indeed?” thought Elsley.

“It’s no business of mine, no man’s less:  but I often wonder why you poets don’t take to the microscope, and tell us a little more about the wonderful things which are here already, and not about those which are not, and which, perhaps, never will be.”

“Well,” said Elsley, after another look:  “but, after all, these things have no human interest in them.”

“I don’t know that; they have to me, for instance.  These are the things which I would write about if I had any turn for verse, not about human nature, of which I know, I’m afraid, a little too much already.  I always like to read old ‘Darwin’s Loves of the Plants;’ bosh as it is in a scientific point of view, it amuses one’s fancy without making one lose one’s temper, as one must when one begins to analyse the microscopic ape called self and friends.

“You would like, then, the old Cosmogonies, the Eddas and the Vedas,” said Elsley, getting interested, as most people did after five minutes’ talk with the cynical doctor.  “I suppose you would not say much for their science; but, as poetry, they are just what you ask for—­the expression of thoughtful spirits, who looked round upon nature with awe-struck, childlike eyes, and asked of all heaven and earth the question, ‘What are you?  How came you to be?’ Yet—­it may be my fault—­while I admire them, I cannot sympathise with them.  To me, this zoophyte is as a being of another sphere; and till I can create some link in my own mind between it and humanity it is as nothing in my eyes.”

“There is link enough, sir, don’t doubt, and chains of iron and brass too.”

“You believe then, in the development theory of the ’Vestiges’?”

“Doctors who have their bread to earn never commit themselves to theories.  No; all I meant was, that this little zoophyte lives by the same laws as you and I; and that he, and the sea-weeds, and so forth, teach us doctors certain little rules concerning life and death, which you will have a chance soon of seeing at work on the most grand and poetical, and indeed altogether tragic scale.”