into playing a
great joke on her husband.

For she saves her odd pennies against his birthday and presents him with
a book. "A book of higher knowledge, it is," she says, while Mike
scratches his head in awe; and she must kiss him for the kind interest
he takes and that evening read to him a page in a voice like the song of
soldiers marching. Mike toils after in mind with his big fists gripping
and forehead glistening in the struggle to remember the journey, but at
the end a darkness comes down on him, and the two gaze at each other
uneasily and the page is read over again.

But devil a bit can Mike remember of it, so that he sits despairing with
his head between his hands. "Do not mind, Molly," he says then; "you
shall study on alone at the higher knowledge, having a joy of it which
is not for me." He says this, looking up to smile, and yet the big hands
hold on to hers as if fearing she was being stolen away.

But Molly answers him back so clear and strong that the song of soldiers
marching is nothing to it. "'T is only the joke I am playing. Am I the
wife to bother you with learning when you know already so much," she
says, "and have the care of the section on your mind, with ties to lay
straight and rails to spike fast so that the great railroad may run?"
And when he speaks once more of the study she should make of knowledge
Molly closes the big book and sets it on the mantel along with the
clock.

"'T is for ornament, and now you know why I bought it from the peddler,"
she explains; "for every household of pretension must have a book."

So they admire the shiny binding and gold letters, and after five years
when their new cottage is built it is given a shelf of its own.

Danny is born, the same who in Molly's lifetime shall be an official of
the great railroad; and when in the course of time he is turned a sturdy
boy of seven, with coal-black eyes and a round cropped head, she would
place the book in his hands for purposes of learning. But detecting the
fear of Michael as he smokes in the evening with eyes on the shelf, that
the mysterious volume may contain matter treasonable to their state and
condition, she ignores the higher knowledge completely and is content to
send Danny only to the Turntable school.

A cruel one he is to the old master there, inking the pages of his
reader and carving a locomotive on his desk; and when he is twelve he
has decided against all books and school and is interested only i