s behaviour
is often such as no just man could condone. Has he not his good points
also?

Will the fat, sleek, "virtuous" man be as Welcome at the gate of heaven
as he supposes?

"Well," St. Peter may say to him, opening the door a little way and
looking him up and down, "what is it now?"

"It's me," the virtuous man will reply, with an oily, self-satisfied
smile; "I should say, I--I've come."

"Yes, I see you have come; but what is your claim to admittance? What
have you done with your three score years and ten?"

"Done!" the virtuous man will answer, "I have done nothing, I assure
you."

"Nothing!"

"Nothing; that is my strong point; that is why I am here. I have never
done any wrong."

"And what good have you done?"

"What good!"

"Aye, what good? Do not you even know the meaning of the word? What
human creature is the better for your having eaten and drunk and slept
these years? You have done no harm--no harm to yourself. Perhaps, if you
had you might have done some good with it; the two are generally to be
found together down below, I remember. What good have you done that you
should enter here? This is no mummy chamber; this is the place of
men and women who have lived, who have wrought good--and evil also,
alas!--for the sinners who fight for the right, not the righteous who
run with their souls from the fight."

It was not, however, to speak of these things that I remembered The
Amateur and its lessons. My intention was but to lead up to the story of
a certain small boy, who in the doing of tasks not required of him was
exceedingly clever. I wish to tell you his story, because, as do most
true tales, it possesses a moral, and stories without a moral I deem to
be but foolish literature, resembling roads that lead to nowhere, such
as sick folk tramp for exercise.

I have known this little boy to take an expensive eight-day clock to
pieces, and make of it a toy steamboat. True, it was not, when made,
very much of a steamboat; but taking into consideration all the
difficulties--the inadaptability of eight-day clock machinery to
steamboat requirements, the necessity of getting the work accomplished
quickly, before conservatively-minded people with no enthusiasm for
science could interfere--a good enough steamboat. With merely an
ironing-board and a few dozen meat-skewers, he would--provided the
ironing-board was not missed in time--turn out quite a practicable
rabbit-hutch. He could make a gun out o