aid. "You must have
been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well
and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my
life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as
that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have
dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that
we could not give it."

"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touch
of cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them.
The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best
doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live
more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never
resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the
germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss.
The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and
leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to
disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been
bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in
us.'"

"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "I am
not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:--

"Something short in the making, Something lost on the way,
As the little soul was taking Its path to the break of day.

"Only his mood or passion,
But it twitched an atom back,
And she for her gods of fashion
Filched from the pilgrim's pack.

"The father did not mean it,
The mother did not know,
No human eye had seen it,
But the little soul needed it so.

"Thro' the street there passed a cripple
Maimed from before its birth;
On the strange face gleamed a ripple
Like a half dawn on the earth.

"It passed, and it awed the city
As one not alive nor dead;
Eyes looked and burned with pity.
'He is not all there,' they said.

"Not all! for part is behind it,
Lying dropped on the way;
That part--could two but find it,
How welcome the end of day!"

For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had
wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and
her eyes looking far out to sea.

"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for
shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men
who