MY DEAR SALISBURY,—­Pray accept this unworthy tribute of
my affectionate esteem.

There were heaps of others.  And looking at those heaps it suddenly came sharp and vivid before my mind that there—­there was the book I needed, already written!  A blank page, a dedication, a blank page, a dedication, and so on.  I saw no reason to change the title.  It only remained to select the things, and the book was done.  I set to work at once, and in a very little while my bibelot was selected.  There were dedications fulsome and fluid, dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in verse and dedications in the dead languages:  all sorts and conditions of dedications, even the simple “To J.H.  Gabbles”—­so suggestive of the modest white stones of the village churchyard.  Altogether I picked out one hundred and three dedications.  At last only one thing remained to complete the book.  And that was—­the Dedication.  You will scarcely credit it, but that worries me still....

I am almost inclined to think that Dedications are going out of fashion.

THROUGH A MICROSCOPE

SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS

This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera and obtained a microscope—­a short, complacent-looking implement it is, of brass—­and he goes about everywhere now with little glass bottles in his pocket, ready to jump upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it home and pry into its affairs.  Within his study window are perhaps half a dozen jars and basins full of green scum and choice specimens of black mud in which his victims live.  He persists in making me look through this instrument, though I would rather I did not.  It seems to me a kind of impropriety even when I do it.  He gets innumerable things in a drop of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and, of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on living just as they did before they were observed.  It makes me feel at times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such creature.

Certainly there are odd things enough in the water.  Among others, certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals.  Most of the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world.  The dabbler says it’s quite a usual thing among the lower plants—­Algae he calls them, for some reason—­to disgorge themselves in this way and go swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things.  If the lower plants, why not the higher?  It may be my abominable imagination, but since he told me about these—­swarm spores I think he called them—­I don’t feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.