benign smile. "They don't
look as if you ever had had."

Howard Snelling glanced down at his slender, well-modelled hands with
their carefully manicured nails.

"I haven't done much carpentry of late years," he confessed. "It would
be quite a novelty were I to be turned loose in a place like this. I
should like nothing better."

"You don't say so!" responded Willie, with pleased surprise. "Well,
well! Ain't that queer now? I'd much sooner 'a' put you down as a
gentleman who wouldn't want to get into no dirt or clutter."

"You don't know me."

"Evidently not," the old man rejoined. "Well, you can have your wish
fur's carpenterin' goes. You can putter round here much as you like."

Mr. Snelling moved toward the long workbench.

"This is a neat thing," remarked he, regarding the unfinished invention
quite as if he had never heard of it before. "What are you doing here?"

A glow of satisfaction spread over the little fellow's kindly face.

"Why, me an' Bob," he explained, "are tinkerin' with a notion I got
into my head a while ago. The idee kitched me in the night, an' I come
downstairs an' commenced tacklin' it right away. But I didn't see my
course ahead, an' 'twarn't 'til Bob hove in sight an' lent a helpin'
hand that the contraption begun to take shape. But for him 'twould
never have amounted to a darn thing, I reckon. I ain't much on the
puttin' together, anyhow, an' this was such a whale of a scheme it had
me floored. But it didn't seem to strike Bob abeam. He went at it
like a dogfish for bait, an' he's beginnin' to tow the thing out of the
fog now into clear water."

"It's quite a scheme," observed Snelling, with an assumed nonchalance.
"How did you happen on it?"

"Them idees just come to me," was the ingenuous reply. "Some brains,
like some gardens, grow one thing, some another. Mine seems to turn
out stuff like this."

"It's pretty good stuff."

"It's a lot of bother to me sometimes," said the old man simply.
"Still, I enjoy it. I'd be badly off if it warn't for the thinkin' I
do. What a marvel thinkin' is, ain't it? You can think all sorts of
things; can travel in your mind to 'most every corner of the globe.
You can think yourself rich, think yourself poor, think yourself young,
think yourself happy. There's nothin' you want you can't think you
have, an' dreamin' about it is 'most as good as gettin' it."

Mr. Snelling nodded.

"Sometimes I think myself an artist, sometim