ot been a good boy. And that history, in the hands of a
master--one who had the organ of the conditional praeterpluperfect tense
very large--might have worked out the same as this.

The story may be thankful that no such task has fallen to its author's
lot. It is so much easier to tell something that actually did happen
than to make up as you go.

Dave was soon as bad as ever--no doubt of it. Only he kept clear of that
post. The burnt child dreads the fire, and the chances are that
admonitions not to climb up on posts had less to do with his abstention
from this one than the lesson the post itself had hammered into the back
of his head. Exploration of the outer world--of the regions imperfectly
known beyond that post--had so far produced no fatal consequences; so
that Aunt M'riar's and Uncle Mo's warnings to the children to keep
within bounds had not the same convincing character.

But a time was at hand for the passion of exploration to seize upon
these two very young people, and to become an excitement as absorbing to
them as the discovery of America to Paolo Toscanelli and Christopher
Columbus. At first it was satisfied by the _cul-de-sac_ recess on which
Sapps Court opened. But this palled, and no wonder! How could it compete
with the public highway out of which it branched, especially when there
was a new shore--that is to say, sewer--in course of construction?

To stand on the edge of a chasm which certainly reached to the bowels of
the earth, and to see them shovelled up from platform to platform by
agencies that spat upon their hands for some professional reason
whenever there came a lull in the supply from below, was to find life
worth living indeed. These agencies conversed continually about an
injury that had been inflicted on them by the Will of God, the selfish
caprice of their employers, or the cupidity of the rich. They appeared
to be capable of shovelling in any space, however narrow, almost to the
extent of surrendering one dimension and occupying only a plane surface.
But it hadn't come to that yet. The battens that kept the trench-sides
vertical were wider apart than what you'd have thought, when you come to
try 'em with a two-fut rule. And the short lengths of quartering that
kep' 'em apart were not really intersecting the diggers' anatomies as
the weaver's shuttle passes through the warp. That was only the
impression of the unconcerned spectator as he walked above them over the
plank bridge that