lgebra for school use. If I'm not much mistaken,
I can turn out something that will supplant all the present books.
Think! If Micklethwaite's Algebra got accepted in all the schools, what
would that mean to Mick? Hundreds a year, my boy--hundreds.'

'I never knew you so indecent.'

'I am renewing my youth. Nay, for the first time I am youthful. I never
had time for it before. At the age of sixteen I began to teach in a
school, and ever since I have pegged away at it, school and private.
Now luck has come to me, and I feel five-and-twenty. When I was really
five-and-twenty, I felt forty.'

'Well, what has that to do with money-making?'

'After Mick's Algebra would follow naturally Mick's Arithmetic, Mick's
Euclid, Mick's Trigonometry. Twenty years hence I should have an income
of thousands--thousands! I would then cease to teach (resign my
professorship--that is to say, for of course I should be professor),
and devote myself to a great work on Probability. Many a man has begun
the best of his life at sixty--the most enjoyable part of it, I mean.'

Barfoot was perplexed. He knew his friend's turn for humorous
exaggeration, but had never once heard him scheme for material
advancement, and evidently this present talk meant something more than
a jest.

'Am I right or not? You are going to get married?'

Micklethwaite glanced at the door, then said in a tone of caution,--

'I don't care to talk about it here. Let us go somewhere and eat
together. I invite you to have dinner with me--or lunch, as I suppose
you would call it, in your aristocratic language.'

'No, you had better have lunch with me. Come to my club.'

'Confound your impudence! Am I not your father in mathematics?'

'Be so good as to put on a decent pair of trousers, and brush your
hair. Ah, here is your Trilinear production. I'll look over it whilst
you make yourself presentable.'

'There's a bad misprint in the Preface. Let me show you--'

'It's all the same to me, my dear fellow.'

But Micklethwaite was not content until he had indicated the error, and
had talked for five minutes about the absurdities that it involved.

'How do you suppose I got the thing published?' he then asked. 'Old
Bennet, the Sheffield headmaster, is security for loss if the book
doesn't pay for itself in two years' time. Kind of him, wasn't it? He
pressed the offer upon me, and I think he's prouder of the book than I
am myself. But it's quite remarkable how kind people a