nd try to
drown my grief in more copious drafts of work.

And I shall have quite enough to do, for mathematics, the sciences,
and the arts and crafts all lie ahead of me in my programme. I
plainly see that I have played my last game of tiddledywinks and
solitaire. But I'll have fun anyhow. If I gain a half-year in each
twelve-month as I have my programme mapped out, in seventy years I
shall have a net gain of thirty-five years. Then, when Atropos comes
along with her scissors to snip the thread, thinking I have reached
my threescore and ten, I shall laugh in her face and let her know,
between laughs, that I am really one hundred and five, and have
played a thirty-five-year joke on her. Then I shall quote Bacon at
her to clinch the joke: "A man may be young in years but old in hours
if he have lost no time."

CHAPTER XXX

FOUR-LEAF CLOVER

I have no ambition to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an
iconoclast. To aspire in either of these directions is bad for the
digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much
that is desirable in human affairs. Introspection has its uses, to
be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as an objective. A
stomach is a valuable asset if only one is not conscious of it. One
of the emoluments of schoolmastering is the opportunity it affords
for communing with elect souls whose very presence is a tonic. Will
is one of these. He has a way of shunting my introspection over to
the track of the head or the heart. He just talks along and the
first thing I know the heart is singing its way through and above the
storm, while the head has been connected up to the heart, and they
are doing team-work that is good for me and good for all who meet me.
At church I like to have them sing the hymn whose closing couplet is:

"I'll drop my burden at his feet
And bear a song away."

I come out strong in singing that couplet, for I like it. In a human
sense, that is just what happens when I chat with Will for an hour.
When I ask him for bread, he never gives me a stone. On the
contrary, he gives me good, white bread, and a bit of cake, besides.

In one of our chats the other day he was dilating upon Henry van
Dyke's four rules, and very soon had banished all my little clouds
and made my mental sky clear and bright. When I get around to
evolving a definition of education I think I shall say that it is the
process of furnishing people with resources fo