“We should always be arguing and fussing and disputing over the merest trifles.  We should lose worlds of time, for we couldn’t go down-stairs or up, couldn’t go to bed, couldn’t rise, couldn’t wash, couldn’t dress, couldn’t stand up, couldn’t sit down, couldn’t even cross our legs, without calling a meeting first and explaining the case and passing resolutions, and getting consent.  It wouldn’t ever do—­now would it?”

“Do?  Why, it would wear a person out in a week!  Did you ever hear anything like it, Patsy Cooper?”

“Oh, you’ll find there’s more than one thing about them that ain’t commonplace,” said the widow, with the complacent air of a person with a property right in a novelty that is under admiring scrutiny.

“Well, now, how ever do you manage it?  I don’t mind saying I’m suffering to know.”

“He who made us,” said Angelo reverently, “and with us this difficulty, also provided a way out of it.  By a mysterious law of our being, each of us has utter and indisputable command of our body a week at a time, turn and turn about.”

“Well, I never!  Now ain’t that beautiful!”

“Yes, it is beautiful and infinitely wise and just.  The week ends every Saturday at midnight to the minute, to the second, to the last shade of a fraction of a second, infallibly, unerringly, and in that instant the one brother’s power over the body vanishes and the other brother takes possession, asleep or awake.”

“How marvelous are His ways, and past finding out!”

Luigi said:  “So exactly to the instant does the change come, that during our stay in many of the great cities of the world, the public clocks were regulated by it; and as hundreds of thousands of private clocks and watches were set and corrected in accordance with the public clocks, we really furnished the standard time for the entire city.”

“Don’t tell me that He don’t do miracles any more!  Blowing down the walls of Jericho with rams’ horns wa’n’t as difficult, in my opinion.”

“And that is not all,” said Angelo.  “A thing that is even more marvelous, perhaps, is the fact that the change takes note of longitude and fits itself to the meridian we are on.  Luigi is in command this week.  Now, if on Saturday night at a moment before midnight we could fly in an instant to a point fifteen degrees west of here, he would hold possession of the power another hour, for the change observes local time and no other.”

Betsy Hale was deeply impressed, and said with solemnity: 

“Patsy Cooper, for detail it lays over the Passage of the Red Sea.”

“Now, I shouldn’t go as far as that,” said Aunt Patsy, “but if you’ve a mind to say Sodom and Gomorrah, I am with you, Betsy Hale.”

“I am agreeable, then, though I do think I was right, and I believe Parson Maltby would say the same.  Well, now, there’s another thing.  Suppose one of you wants to borrow the legs a minute from the one that’s got them, could he let him?”