desirous of making a favorable
impression. It seems that when Galileo and Herschel were little tots I
undertook to construct a playhouse for them in the back yard. This was
at a time when I was exceptionally busied with my professional studies;
Mars was rapidly approaching perihelion, and I had been commissioned by
the Blue Island Society of the Arts and Sciences to prepare a chart of
the bottle-neck seas. It would have been surprising indeed had I not
been preoccupied--too absorbed in intellectual pursuits to cope
successfully with any such worldly and prosaic thing as a playhouse in
the back yard. Yet Alice insists that it is most amusing that I should
have neglected to provide that structure with windows and a door, and
that, as a natural consequence, I should have nailed myself up securely
in that affair.

On another occasion I painted myself gradually into a corner while
attempting to paint the floor of the spare chamber. Alice reproached
me bitterly for this; she said she supposed everybody knew that a floor
should always be painted toward, and not away from the door. Alice
seems never to consider that few other people are gifted with such
intuitions as she has, but are compelled to drag along through life
learning by experience.

I do not wish to be understood as complaining or railing against fate
because I am not skilled in mechanics; I recognize as a distinct boon
the fact that I am awkward in the use of tools, and the further fact
that I have no ambition in the direction of mechanical endeavor has
doubtless saved me many a bruised thumb and a vast amount of hard
labor. When I see my neighbors tinkering away at their storm windows
and garbage boxes and grape vine trellises and dog kennels and window
screens and front gates, I do not neglect to thank heaven that Alice
has the best of reasons for not asking me to engage in similar odd jobs
about our house.

Still, I am sure that, if I ever do engage in any avocation, it will be
that of nailing lath, an employment requiring an exercise of patience,
of intelligence, and of skill to the highest degree.

Until we bought the new place I had no idea that the expense of
conducting an establishment of one's own was so large. It seems,
however, that when one has once become a property-owner there is no end
to the things one must have and cannot get along without. It is
impossible to say how or where the venders of patent arrangements find
out about you, but