Some of the lower animals held a convention to settle for ever the
unspeakably important question, What is Life?
"Life," squeaked the poet, blinking and folding his filmy wings,
"is--." His kind having been already very numerously heard from upon
the subject, he was choked off.
"Life," said the scientist, in a voice smothered by the earth he was
throwing up into small hills, "is the harmonious action of
heterogeneous but related faculties, operating in accordance with
certain natural laws."
"Ah!" chattered the lover, "but that thawt of thing is vewy gweat
blith in the thothiety of one'th thweetheart." And curling his tail
about a branch, he swung himself heavenward and had a spasm.
"It is _vita_!" grunted the sententious scholar, pausing in his
mastication of a Chaldaic root.
"It is a thistle," brayed the warrior: "very nice thing to take!"
"Life, my friends," croaked the philosopher from his hollow tree,
dropping the lids over his cattish eyes, "is a disease. We are all
symptoms."
"Pooh!" ejaculated the physician, uncoiling and springing his rattle.
"How then does it happen that when _we_ remove the symptoms, the
disease is gone?"
"I would give something to know that," replied the philosopher,
musingly; "but I suspect that in most cases the inflammation remains,
and is intensified."