aid she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt
us."

And a moment later:

"Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure
out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and
show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would
quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people
any."

VI

THE PORCH WREN

So it befell, in a shining and memorable interlude that there was
talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his
wainscoting; of the oldest living debutante, who was also a porch wren;
and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and
again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be
worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse
as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman
thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites.

It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems
to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It
came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John
Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion
in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all
snapshots--a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully
swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk
through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent
faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was
a weakish white blob.

I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments
burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon
over a thousand.

"Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly.

"I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large
playful manner.

I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled
cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a
human infant--or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady
drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot:

"No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."

This, indeed, piqued me. It made a difference. I said was it possible?
Mrs. Pettengill said it was worse than possible; it was inevitable. She
seemed about to rest there; so I accused her of ill-natured jesting