morning."

"Every Monday?" queried the School-master.

"Every Monday," returned the Idiot. "That is, of course, every Monday
that I pay. The things one gets to eat in the country, the air one
breathes, the utter freedom from restraint, the thousand and more things
one enjoys in the suburbs that are not attainable here--it is these that
make my heart yearn for the open."

[Illustration: "'A LITTLE GARDEN OF MY OWN, WHERE I COULD RAISE AN
OCCASIONAL CAN OF TOMATOES'"]

"Well, it's all rot," said the School-master, impatiently. "Country life
is ideal only in books. Books do not tell of running for trains through
blinding snowstorms; writers do not expatiate on the delights of
waking on cold winter nights and finding your piano and parlor furniture
afloat because of bursted pipes, with the plumber, like Sheridan at
Winchester, twenty miles away. They are dumb on the subject of the
ecstasy one feels when pushing a twenty-pound lawn-mower up and down a
weed patch at the end of a wearisome hot summer's day. They are
silent--"

"Don't get excited, Mr. Pedagog, please," interrupted the Idiot. "I am
not contemplating leaving you and Mrs. Smithers, but I do pine for a
little garden of my own, where I could raise an occasional can of
tomatoes. I dream sometimes of getting milk fresh from the pump, instead
of twenty-four hours after it has been drawn, as we do here. In my
musings it seems to me to be almost idyllic to have known a spring
chicken in his infancy; to have watched a hind-quarter of lamb
gambolling about its native heath before its muscles became adamant, and
before chopped-up celery tops steeped in vinegar were poured upon it in
the hope of hypnotizing boarders into the belief that spring lamb and
mint-sauce lay before them. What care I how hard it is to rise every
morning before six in winter to thaw out the boiler, so long as the
night coming finds me seated in the genial glow of the gas log! What man
is he that would complain of having to bale out his cellar every week,
if, on the other hand, that cellar gains thereby a fertility that keeps
its floor sheeny, soft, and green--an interior tennis-court--from spring
to spring, causing the gladsome click of the lawn-mower to be heard
within its walls all through the still watches of the winter day? I
tell you, sir, it is the life to lead, that of our rural brother. I do
not believe that in this whole vast city there is a cellar like that--an
in-door garden-patch, a