But the bear is like a sign-post at a parting of the ways.  If you compare a brown bear with the black Indian, or sloth bear, as it is sometimes called, you may detect a small but pregnant difference.  When the former walks, its claws are lifted, so that their points do not touch the ground.  Why?  I have no information, but I know that it is not content with a vegetarian diet, like its black relative, but hankers after sheep and goats, and I guess that its murderous thoughts flow down its nerves to those keen claws.  It reminds me of a man clenching his fist unconsciously when he thinks of the liar who has slandered him.

[Illustration:  IT HAS TO DOUBLE THEM UNDER AND HOBBLE ABOUT LIKE A CHINESE LADY.]

But what ages of concentration on the thought and practice of assassination must have been required to perfect that most awful weapon in Nature, the paw of a tiger, or, indeed, of any cat, for they are all of one pattern.  The sharpened flint of the savage has become the scimitar of Saladin, keeping the keenness of its edge in a velvet sheath and flashing out only on the field of battle.  Compare that paw with the foot of a dog, and you will, perhaps, see with me that the servility and pliancy of the slave of man has usurped a place in his esteem which is not its due.  The cat is much the nobler animal.  Dogs, with wolves, jackals, and all of their kin, love to fall upon their victim in overwhelming force, like a rascally mob, and bite, tear, and worry until the life has gone out of it; the tiger, rushing single-handed, with a fearful challenge, on the gigantic buffalo, grasps its nose with one paw and its shoulder with the other, and has broken its massive neck in a manner so dexterous and instantaneous that scarcely two sportsmen can agree about how the thing is done.

I have said that the foot first appeared when the backboned creatures came out of the waters to live upon the dry land.  But all mundane things (not excepting politics) tend to move in circles, ending where they began; and so the foot, if we follow it far enough, will take us back into water.  See how the rat—­I mean our common, omnivorous, scavenging, thieving, poaching brown rat—­when it lives near a pond or stream, learns to swim and dive as naturally as a duck.  Next comes the vole, or water-rat, which will not live away from water.  Then there are water shrews, the beaver, otter, duck-billed platypus, and a host of others, not related, just as, among birds, there are water ousels, moorhens, ducks, divers, etc., which have permanently made the water their home and seek their living in it.  All these have attained to web-footedness in a greater or less degree.

That this has occurred among reptiles, beasts, and birds alike shows what an easy, or natural, or obvious (put it as you will) modification it is.  And it has a consequence not to be escaped.  Just as a man who rides a great deal and never walks acquires a certain indirectness of the legs, and you never mistake a jockey for a drill-sergeant, so the web-footed beasts are not among the things that are “comely in going.”