my fingers and creep up my wrist, paralyzing my arm; and its
incessant and piercing shrieks deafened me.

In vain I transferred it to the other hand, and then passed it from one
hand to the other, as one shifts a lump of ice or a hot potato, in an
attempt to endure the temperature: it shrieked and squirmed and doubled,
and finally wriggled out of my stiffened and useless hands, and scuttled
away into the fire.

It was an overwhelming disappointment. For a moment it seemed
unendurable.

"Never mind," I said, huskily, "if I caught one in my hands, I can surely
catch another in a trap."

"I am so sorry for your disappointment," she said, pitifully.

"Do _you_ care, Miss Blythe?" I asked.

She blushed.

"Of course I care," she murmured.

My hands were too badly frost-nipped to become eloquent. I merely sighed
and thrust them into my pockets. Even my arm was too stiff to encircle
her shapeful waist. Devotion to Science had temporarily crippled me. Love
must wait. But, as we ascended the grassy slope together, I promised
myself that I would make her a good husband, and that I should spend at
least part of every day of my life in trapping crows and smearing their
claws with glue.

That evening I was seated on the veranda beside Wilna--Miss Blythe's name
was Wilna--and what with gazing at her and fitting together some of the
folding box-traps which I always carried with me--and what with trying to
realise the pecuniary magnificence of our future existence together, I
was exceedingly busy when Blythe came in to display, as I supposed, his
most recent daub to me.

The canvas he carried presented a series of crimson speckles, out of
which burst an eruption of green streaks--and it made me think of
stepping on a caterpillar.

My instinct was to placate this impossible man. He was _her_ father. I
meant to honour him if I had to assault him to do it.

"Supremely satisfying!" I nodded, chary of naming the subject. "It is a
stride beyond the art of the future: it is a flying leap out of the Not
Yet into the Possibly Perhaps! I thank you for enlightening me, Mr.
Blythe. I am your debtor."

He fairly snarled at me:

"What are _you_ talking about!" he demanded.

I remained modestly mute.

To Wilna he said, pointing passionately at his canvas:

"The crows have been walking all over it again! I'm going to paint in the
woods after this, earthquakes or no earthquakes. Have the trees been
heaved up anywhere recently?"