e impatiently.

"A reservoir will entail some expense," the professor rambled on; "but
the money will come. 'To him that hath shall be given.'"

Palmerston's face completed the quotation, but the speaker went on
without opening his eyes: "When the water is once flowing out of the
tunnel, capital will flow into it."

"A good deal of capital will flow into the tunnel before any water flows
out of it," growled Palmerston, taking advantage of his companion's
physical defect to relieve his mind.

Later in the evening Dysart drew the young man into the family
conference, relying upon the sympathy of sex in the effort to allay his
wife's misgivings.

"The tunnel won't cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do
myself," maintained the little man, "and the professor says we'll strike
water that'll drown us out before we've gone a hundred feet. Emeline
here she's afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her
it's pure science. It isn't any more wonderful than a needle traveling
toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off
it is, something like a compass--I don't understand it, but I can see
that it ain't any more meraculous than a telegraph. It's science."

"Oh, yes, I know," mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small
rocking-chair on the piazza; "there's folks that think the creation of
the world in six days is nothin' but science, but they're not people for
Christians to be goin' pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of
dirt on top of that water, I tell Jawn he had his reasons, and I can't
think it's right for anybody whose treasure ought to be laid up in
heaven to go pryin' into the bowels of the earth huntin' for things that
our heavenly Fawther's hid."

"But there's gold, Emeline."

"Oh, yes; I know there's gold, and I know 'the love of money is the root
of all evil.' I don't say that the Lord don't reign over the inside of
the earth, but I do say that people that get their minds fixed on things
that's underground are liable to forget the things that are above."

"Well, now, I'm sure they hadn't ought," protested Dysart. "I'm sure
'the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof,' Emeline."

Mrs. Dysart sank slowly back in her chair at this unexpected thrust from
her own weapon, and then rallied with a long, corpulent sigh.

"Well, I don't know. You recollect that old man was up here last winter,
hammerin' around among the rocks as if the earth was a big