But Hester never knew how long ago that discovery had taken place. Neither did Society, who, after the first shock, smiled benignant acquiescence, and said, "To think of its being all through that little theme with variations that Giovanni wrote from memory. Delightfully romantic!"
"Oh! Uncle Arthur, you're too, too kind to us," Hester said later in the day.
The Dasypidæ are not such fearful wild-fowl as their name may seem to indicate; for the name Dasypus is nothing but the scientific naturalist's innocent little Greek way of saying "hairy-foot." The Sloth, the Scaly Manis, the Armadillo, the Platypus, the Aard-Vark, the Ant-eater, and one or two more comprise the family, presenting the appearance of a job-lot of odds and ends at the tail of an auctioneer's catalogue. Not only is the family of a job-lot nature, but each individual seems a sort of haphazard assemblage of odd parts made up together to save wasting the pieces; for some have tremendous tails, and some have almost none; some have armour and some have hair; one has an odd beak, apparently discarded by a duck as awkwardly shaped; some have two toes only on a foot, some three, some four, and some five--just as luck might have it in the scramble, so to speak; they only agree in being all very hard up for teeth.
The sloth is an admirable creature in many respects. Chiefly, he has a glorious gift of inaction--a thing too little esteemed and insufficiently cultivated in these times. If it is sweet to do nothing, as we have it on the unimpeachable authority of a proverb, therefore it must be actually noble to do nothing on scientific principles, as does the sloth. The objectionably moral and energetic class of philosopher is always ready to enlist the ant, the bee, and similarly absurdly busy creatures as practical sermons on his side; and that the indolent philosopher has never retaliated with the sloth is due merely to the fact that he _is_ indolent, practically as well as theoretically. Yet the sloth has well-esteemed relations. Consider other proverbs. "Sloth," says one, "is the mother of necessity." Then another. "Necessity," says this second, "is the mother of invention." Whence it plainly follows that sloth is invention's grandmother--although nobody would think it to look at the sloth here, in house number forty-seven.