nd buying boots, is responsible for this also.
Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing
and cannot be parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the
naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to
discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of
soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from
scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping
out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal
having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to
prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be
good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to
a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise
at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated
civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will
not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.

"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when
a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into
Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions,
but because they are the two most important professions in the world
their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."

Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman
absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away
wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me
if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money
he said good-night.

V

The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might
have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he
had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his
face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke
for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and,
remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to
the following weighty monologue--

"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not
alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the
ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt
to give variety and distinction to its beverages.

"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water,
and hot water to boot, for at that era