o a mite of shoppin' or marketin' but for Delight
stayin' with the babies whilst she was gone. I couldn't tell you half
what that girl does. She's here, there, an' everywhere. Now she's
gettin' up a party for the school children; now makin' a birthday cake
for somebody; now trimmin' a bunnit for Tiny or helpin' her plan out a
dress."

Willie stopped to rummage on a distant shelf for a level.

"Once," he went on, "Sarah Libbie Lewis asked me what Delight was goin'
to be. I told her there warn't no goin' to be about it; Delight was
bein' it right now. She didn't need to go soundin' for a mission in
life."

"I take it you are not in favor of careers for women, Mr. Spence,"
observed Robert Morton, who had been eagerly drinking in every word the
old man uttered.

"Yes, I am," contradicted the inventor. "There's times when a girl
needs a career, but there's other times when to desert one's plain duty
an' go huntin' a callin' is criminal. Queer how people will look right
over the top of what they don't want to see, ain't it? I s'pose its
human nature though," he mused.

A soft breeze stirred the shavings on the floor.

"Tiny thinks," resumed the quiet voice, "that I mix myself up too much
with other folks's concerns anyhow. Leastways, she says I let their
troubles weigh on me more'n I'd ought. But to save my life I can't
seem to help it. Don't you believe those on the outside of a tangle
sometimes see it straighter than them that is snarled up in the mess?"

Robert Morton nodded.

"That's the way I figger it," rambled on the old man. "Mebbe that's
the reason I can't keep my fingers out of the pie. You'd be surprised
enough if you was to know the things I've been dragged into in my
lifetime; family quarrels, will-makin's, business matters that I didn't
know no more about than the man in the moon. Why, I've even taken a
hand in love affairs!"

He broke into a peal of hearty laughter. "That's the beatereee!" he
declared, slapping his thigh. "'Magine me up to my ears in a love
affair! But I have been--scores of 'em, enough I reckon, put 'em all
together, to marry off the whole of Cape Cod."

"You must be quite an authority on the heart by this time," Robert
Morton ventured.

"I ain't," the other declared soberly. "You see, none of the snarls
was ever the same, so you kinder had to feel your way along every time
like as if you was navigatin' a new channel. Women may be all alike,
take 'em in the ma