Peter

Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away -- the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise

in unison like the porcupine’s quills -- motionless. He lets himself be flat- tened out by gravity, as it were a piece of seaweed tamed and weakened by exposure to the sun; compelled when extended, to lie stationary. Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as well as one can for oneself; sleep -- epitome of what is to

him as to the average person, the end of life. Demonstrate on him how the lady caught the dangerous southern snake, placing a forked stick on either side of its innocuous neck; one need not try to stir him up; his prune shaped head and alligator eyes are not a party to the joke. Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel or set

up on the forearm like a mouse; his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s width, are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. May be? I should say, might have been; when he has been got the better of in a dream -- as in a fight with nature or with cats -- we all know it. Profound sleep is not with him, a fixed illusion. Springing about with froglike ac-

curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand, he is himself again; to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair would be unprofit- able -- human. What is the good hypocrisy? It is permissible to choose one’s employment, to abandon the wire nail, the roly-poly, when it shows signs of being no longer a pleas-

ure, to score the adjacent magazine with a double line of strokes. He can talk, but insolently says nothing. What of it? When one is frank, one’s very presence is a compliment, that he is one of those who do not regard the published fact as a surrender. As for the disposition

invariably to affront, an animal with claws wants to have to use them; that eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air -- to purloin, the pursue. to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go into the wrong way -- in your perturba- tion -- this is life; to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.