speak for 'em all, but I should say
that a good nine-tenths was due to a lack of common sense."

Joel disdained to take up the gauntlet. "Persis, it's clothes."

His sister looked him over. Joel was attired in a pair of bathing
trunks and a bath towel, the latter festooned gracefully about his
body, low enough to show his projecting ribs. "If the style you're
wearing at present was ever to get what you'd call popular," she agreed
dryly, "I think it would make considerable trouble."

Joel again refused to be diverted. "Clothes, Persis, are an invention
of the devil. The electricity of the body, instead of passing off into
the earth as it would do if we went around the way the Lord intended,
is kept pent up in our insides by our clothes, and of course it gets to
playing the mischief with all our organs. As old Fuller says, 'He that
is proud of the rustling of his silks, like a madman laughs at the
rattling of his fetters.'"

"The sun is shining right on your bare back," remarked Persis acridly.
"According to your ideas yesterday, you'd ought to be ready to drop
dead."

Joel magnanimously ignored the taunt. Like some greater men, he had
discovered that to be true to to-day's vision, one must often violate
yesterday's conviction. The charge of inconsistency never troubled him.

"Earth and air are stuffed with helpfulness, Persis, and the clothes we
wear won't give it a chance at us. If the Lord had wanted us to be
covered, we'd have come into the world with a shell like a turtle.
Now, this rig ain't ideal because we've got to make some concessions to
folks' narrowness and prejudice, but it's a long way ahead of ordinary
dress."

"Joel Dale!" The grim resolution of Persis' voice warned the dreamer
of the family that the limit of her forbearance had been reached. "I'm
not going to stand up for clothes, though seeing that my living, and
yours too, depends on 'em, it's not for me to run 'em down. But this I
will say, as long as we live in a civilized land, we've got to act
civilized. And as for having you show yourself on this lawn in a
get-up that would set every dog in Clematis to barking, I won't. Go
up-stairs and dress like somebody beside a Fiji islander, but first
give your feet and legs a good rubbing. If you don't, the next thing
you know, you'll be down with pneumonia."

Perhaps Joel's tyrannical rule in the household for the last twenty
years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yie