by saying:

"Don't worry, dear. He is very serious in this matter. He has always
had a great storm in his mind ever since he was a baby."

"I guess it's a brain-storm," I interjected contemptuously, for I
could not then, and I cannot now conceive of any kind of a shower that
will make the boy's habit of building caravels in the middle of
ten-acre lots, and submarines on fifteen-by-twenty fish ponds, and
schooner yachts on mill-dams only three feet deep at high tide a
reasonable bit of procedure.

Occasionally one of my neighbors would call upon me to remark somewhat
critically on this strange predilection of my son, and several of them
advised me to take the matter seriously in hand before it was too
late.

"If you lived on the seaboard, it would be a fine thing to have such
a son," they said, "but off here in the lumber district it would be
far more to the point if he went in for the breeding of camels, or
some other useful vehicle of transportation, instead of constructing
ferry-boats that never can be launched, and building arks in a spot
where the nearest approach to an ocean is a leak in the horse-trough."

I could not but admit that there was justice in these criticisms, but
when it came to the point I never felt that I could justify myself in
interfering with the boy's hobby until it was too late, and the lad
having passed his three hundredth birthday, was no longer subject to
parental discipline. I reasoned it out that after all it was better
that he should be building dories and canal-boats out under the apple
trees, and having what he called "a caulking good time," in an
innocent way, than spending his time running up and down the Great
White Way, between supper-time and breakfast, making night hideous
with riotous songs, as many youths of his own age were doing; and when
our family physician once tried to get him to join a football eleven
at the Enochsville High School in order to get this obsession of a
deluge out of his mind, I was not a little impressed by the
impertinent pertinence of his ready answer.

"No rush-line for mine, Doctor," he said, firmly. "I'd rather have
water on the brain than on the knee."

I had hoped that as the years passed on he would outgrow not only his
conviction of the imminence of a disastrous deluge by which the world
would be overwhelmed, and the predilection for nautical construction
that the belief had bred in him, but alas for all human expectation,
it grew upon him