one out into such a night.  But the schoolmaster bore her argument down with the word-picture of the little one’s mother pacing back and forth in front of the shack, her hair hanging in strings, her clothing drenched with rain and clinging to her body, her eyes upturned, and her face expressing the most poignant agony.  When they left she had thus been pacing to and fro for seven hours and was, no doubt, doing so yet.  The mother-heart of the woman could not withstand such an appeal, and soon she was busy in the difficult task of trying to get the little arms into the sleeves of dress and apron.  Meanwhile, the two bedraggled men were on their knees striving with that acme of awkwardness of which only men are capable, to ensconce the little feet in stockings and shoes.  The dressing of that child was worthy the brush of Raphael or the smile of angels.  At three o’clock in the morning the schoolmaster stepped from the buggy and placed the sleeping baby in the mother’s arms, and only the heavenly Father knows the language she spoke as she crooned over her little one.  As the schoolmaster wended his way homeward, cold, hungry, and worn he was buoyant in spirit to the point of ecstasy.  But he was chastened, for he had stood upon the Mount of Transfiguration and knew as never before that the mission of the schoolmaster is to find and restore the lost child.

CHAPTER XXIX

LONGEVITY

I’m quite in the notion of playing a practical joke on Atropos, and, perhaps, on Methuselah, while I’m about it.  I’m not partial to Atropos at the best.  She’s such a reckless, uppish, heedless sort of tyrant.  She rushes into huts, palaces, and even into the grand stand, and lays about her with her scissors, snipping off threads with the utmost abandon.  She wields her shears without any sort of apology or by your leave.  Not even a check-book can stay her ravages.  Her devastation knows neither ruth nor gentleness.  I don’t like her, and have no compunction about playing a joke at her expense.  I don’t imagine it will daunt her, in the least, but I can have my fun, at any rate.

It is now just seven o’clock in the evening, and I shall not retire before ten o’clock at the earliest.  So here are three good hours for me to dispose of; and I am the sole arbiter in the matter of disposing of them.  My neighbor John has a cow, and he is applying the efficiency test to her.  He charges her with every pound of corn, bran, fodder, and hay that she eats, and doctor’s bills, too, I suppose, if there are any.  Then he credits her with all the milk she furnishes.  There is quite a book-account in her name, and John has a good time figuring out whether, judged by net results, she is a consumer or a producer.  If I can resurrect sufficient mathematical lore, I think I shall try to apply this efficiency test to my three hours just to see if I can prove that hours are as important as cows.  I ought to be able, somehow, to determine whether these hours are consumers or producers.