out of my sails by demanding, the
first morning at breakfast, if I knew that one half-ounce of the web
of the spider--the arachnid of the order _Araneida_, he explained--if
stretched out in a straight line would reach from the city of Chicago
to the city of Paris. I told him that this was a most wonderful and a
most interesting piece of information and hoped that some day we could
verify it by actual test. Yet when I inquired whether he meant merely
the environs of the city of Paris, or the very heart of the city such
as the Place de l'Opera, he studied me with the meditative eye with
which Huxley must have once studied beetles.

Dinky-Dunk, I notice, is as restive as a bull-moose in black-fly
season. He's doing his work on the land, as about every ranch-owner
has to, whether he's happily married or not, but he's doing it without
any undue impression of its epical importance. I heard him observe,
yesterday, that if he could only get his hands on enough ready money
he'd like to swing into land business in a live center like Calgary.
He has a friend there, apparently, who has just made a clean-up in
city real estate and bought his wife a Detroit Electric and built a
home for himself that cost forty thousand dollars. I reminded
Dinky-Dunk, when he had finished, that we really must have a new
straining-mesh in the milk-separator. He merely looked at me with a
sour and morose eye as he got up and went out to his team.

Surely these men-folks are a dissatisfied lot! Gershom to-night
complained that his own name of "Gershom Binks" impressed him as about
the ugliest name that was ever hitched on to a scholar and a
gentlemen. And later on, after I'd opened my piano and tried to
console myself with a tu'penny draught of Grieg, he inspected the
instrument and informed me that it was really evolved from the
six-stringed harps of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, which in the fifth
dynasty was made with a greatly enlarged base, thus giving the
rudimentary beginning of a soundboard.

I am learning a lot from Gershom! And so are my kiddies, for that
matter. I begin, in fact, to feel like royalty with a private tutor,
for every night now Dinkie and Poppsy and Gershom sit about the
living-room table and drink of the founts of wisdom. But we have a
teacher here who loves to teach. And he is infinitely patient and kind
with my little toddlers. Dinkie already asks him questions without
number, while Poppsy gratefully but decorously vamps hi