“My shining stars!” breathed Sharon.

“And they lost their tails and got so they would wear neckties and have post offices and depots and religions,” added the historian in a final flash of memory.

“Well, I’ll be switched!” said Sharon.

“It’s electricity or something,” explained the lecturer.  “My father said so.”

“Oh!” said Sharon.

“But he says there’s a catch in it somewhere.”

“I should think there was,” said Sharon.  “By gracious goodness, I should think there was a catch in it somewhere!  But you understand the whole thing as easy as crack a nut, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

“Giddap there!” said Sharon.

Wilbur did not tell Winona of this day’s encounter with an authentic Whipple.  He would have done so but for the dollar that Sharon absently bestowed upon him from a crumple of bills when he left the buggy at the entrance to Whipple Old Place.  Winona, he instantly knew, would counsel him to save the dollar, and he did not wish to save it.  As fast as his bare feet—­with a stone bruise on one heel—­would carry him he sped to Solly Gumble’s.  Yet not with wholly selfish intent.  A section of plug tobacco, charmingly named Peach and Honey, was purchased for a quarter as a gift to Bill Bardin of the ice wagon.  Another quarter secured three pale-brown cigars, with gay bands about their middles, to be lavished upon the hero, Starling Tucker.

CHAPTER IX

The colourful years sped.  At fifteen Wilbur Cowan, suddenly alive to this quick way of time, was looking back to the days of his heedless youth.  That long aisle of years seemed unending, but it narrowed in perspective until earlier experiences were but queerly dissolving shapes, wavering of outline, dimly discerned, piquant or sad in the mind, but elusive when he would try to fix them.

On a shining, full-starred night he stood before the little house in the Penniman side yard and bade farewell to this youth.  A long time he gazed into the arched splendour above.  He had never noticed that the stars were so many and so bright; and they were always there, by day as well as by night, so his father said.  Many of them, on the same veracious authority, were peopled; some with people who were yet but monkeys like the Vielhaber’s Emil; some with people now come to be human like himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could surmise.

The aging boy felt suddenly friendly with all those distant worlds, glad they were there, so almost sociably near.  On more than one of them, perhaps far off in that white streak they called the Milky Way, there must be boys like himself, learning useful things about life, to read good books and all about machinery, and have good habits, and so forth.  Surely on one of those far worlds there was at least one boy like himself, who was being a boy for the last time and would to-morrow be a man.  For Wilbur Cowan, beneath this starry welter of creation—­of worlds to be or in being, or lifeless hulks that had been worlds and were outworn—­was on this June night uplifted to face the parting of the ways.  His last day had been lived as a boy with publicly bare feet.