2
degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from
the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should
multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.

I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I
have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and
weighing-machines--they are but the remnants of the fine old communal
life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too
little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares
as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill
our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or
regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile.
Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind
closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because
it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above
reproach and above suspicion.

XXV

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--III

Cooper's museum of Proverbial Realities had proven such a source of
delight to himself and his friends that the news of its destruction by
fire came with a shock to all who knew him. Of all his treasures he
succeeded in saving only part of his priceless collection of straws--the
straw that showed which way the wind blew, the straw grasped at by a
drowning man, the straw that does not enter into the manufacture of
bricks, and the last straw that broke the camel's back. How would Cooper
stand the blow, his friends wondered. He took it very well. Within a
week he had set to work on a new fad, the collection of Statistical
Realities, and in a half-year he had filled three good-sized lofts and
a large back-yard with his treasures. Yesterday he took me through his
galleries.

"What do you make of this?" he said, stopping before a glass jar some
four feet high, in which, to the peril of one's nerves, you could
distinctly see the upper two-thirds of a child's body. Head, trunk, and
arms were beautifully fashioned, but there was no vestige of growth
below the knee-caps. I could only show my astonishment. "Well," he went
on, "you must have seen the statement by the president of Bryn Mawr that
the average number of children among college-bred mothers is 3-6/10.
This is the six-tenths of a child. Here," he said, pointing to another
and somewhat larger jar, "you see three-fifths of a woman; 1-3/5 women
to