h future scientists would wrangle,
part of them making you a god, and the rest proving you a fool. Be
content to 'climb where Moses stood,' and produce literature."

"'Why should an author fret about The judgment of posterity?
It is not, and it never was, And it, perhaps, may never
be,'"

quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and
who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and
show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one
else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind
them?"

Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? God has not left Himself
without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has
gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour.
Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the
half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the
phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the
Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phoenician, was one of their
forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and
almost unaccountable similarities."

She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with
her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said
curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"

"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings
and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I
can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I
cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the
day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer
to _the_ needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of
pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to
compass a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said
quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help
it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"

He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick
yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went
on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said
about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that
they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased
his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race
to find an electric light pl