. And yet, in
spite of her long marvelous tongue--he was beginning to find out that
no tool he had ever seen, and but few that God Himself makes, is so
wonderful as a butterfly's tongue--she hadn't been able to tell him
that about herself which he most wished to find out. _That_ called for
a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.

But he knew that other men knew. And he had to know. He meant to know.
For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for
its service. That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell--a
world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon
another planet--began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many
mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay
beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite. And he couldn't
break into that world with a jimmy. It was burglar-proof. That portal
was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that
John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!

Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you
might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the
underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners
and crannies, or scraping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the
fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and
disgust, but with the student's interest and pleasure.

"Think of me being in the same world with 'em all these years and not
knowing a thing about 'em when there's so much to know, and under my
skin stark crazy to learn it, only I didn't know I even wanted to know
what I really want to know more than anything else, until I had to
get dumped down here to find it out! I get the funniest sort of a
feeling, parson, that all along there's been a Me tucked away inside
my hide that's been loving these things ever since I was born. Not
just to catch and handle 'em, and stretch out their little wings, and
remember the names some bughouse high-brow wished on 'em, though all
that's in the feeling, too; it's something else, if I could make you
understand what I mean."

I laughed. "I think I do understand," said I. "I have a Me like that
tucked away in mine, too, you know."

He looked at me gravely. "Parson," said he, earnestly, "there's times
I wish you had a dozen kids, and every one of 'em twins! It's a shame
to think of some poor orphans swindled out of such a daddy as you'd
have made!"

"Why,