I reckon, parson, the simple is lumped in three
lots--the fool for a little while, the fool for half the day, and the
life-everlasting twenty-four-hours-a-day, dyed-in-the-wool damn-fool.

"Some of us are the life-everlasting kind, the kind that used to make
old man Solomon wall his eyes and throw fits and then get busy and
hatch out proverbs with stings in their tails. A lot of us are
half-the-day fools; and all the rest are fools for a little while.
There's nobody born that hasn't got his times and seasons for being a
fool for a while. But that's the sort of simple the testimony slams
some sense into. Like _me_," he added earnestly, and closed the great
Book.

I told him presently what I had heard; that, as he surmised, Mrs.
Eustis was not responsible for Mary Virginia's change of mind--or
perhaps of heart. He nodded. But he offered no comment. Now, since I
had come in, he had been from time to time casting at me rather
speculative and doubtful glances. He drummed on the table, smiled
sheepishly, and presently reached for a package, unwrapped it, and
laid before me a book.

'"The Relation of Insect Life to Human Society,'" I read, "By John
Flint and Rev. Armand Jean De Rance. With notes and drawings by Father
De Rance." It bore the imprint of a great publishing house.

"You suggested it more than once," said John Flint. "Off and on, these
two years, I've been working on it. All the notes I particularly asked
you for were for this. Mighty fine and acute notes they are,
too--you'd never have been willing to do it if you'd known they were
for publication--I know you. And I saved the drawings. I'm vain of
those illustrations. Abbot's weren't in it, next to yours."

As a matter of fact I have a pretty talent for copying plant and
insect. I have but little originality, but this very limitation made
the drawings more valuable. They were almost painfully exact, the
measurements and coloration being as approximately perfect as I could
get them.

Now that the book has been included in all standard lists I needn't
speak of it at length--the reviewers have given it what measure of
bricks and bouquets it deserved. But it is a clever, able,
comprehensive book, and that is why it has made its wide appeal.

Every least credit that could possibly be given to me, he had
scrupulously rendered. He had made full use of note and drawing. He
made light enough of his own great labor of compilation, but his
preface was quick to state