away in his quarters is amazing. But, as a rule, bears will not stand nonsense. It is well known how they behaved in the matter of Goldy locks, who, after all, had only eaten up the Little Wee Bear’s porridge, and broken the seat of the Little Wee Bear’s chair, and gone to sleep in Little Wee Bear’s bed. Yet, if the family had caught her, poor Goldylocks would probably never have got home to her mother to tell the tale.
This characteristic animosity to man has given many writers on the bear a handle for great unfairness towards it.
I far prefer, my self, to see in the bear only some dull-witted, obstinate Mars, pathetic Jubal, or rough but staunch Sir Bors; some slumberous man of might, a lazy Kwasind, or sluggard Kambu Kharna; an easily befooled Giant Dumbledore or Calabadran; some loyal Earl Arthgal of the Table Round, or moody Margrave of Brandenberg — both of whom did not despise the fighting sobriquet of the Bear. For myself, I think no worse of the bear than Toussenel does, — indeed, hardly so badly; for I hesitate to agree with him that it symbolizes only the spirit of persistent savagery, the incorrigible protest of Routine against Reform; that it is the feral incarnation of hostility to progress, and the champion-in-arms of the pretended rights of the Beast against the authority of Man. Men of science assure us that it is one of the senior quadrupeds of the earth; and it was certainly the first among them that arrived at any idea of using fore paws as hands. But unfortunately for itself it has never raised itself any further in the scale; and now that it has been driven into the forest and wilderness, it seems to consider itself unfairly displaced, and sulkily maintains in the solitudes of
