Tim laughed. "Hey, will this contraption of yours teach me how to adjust
a set of tappets?"

"No," said James quickly. "It will teach you the theory of how to chop
down a tree but it can't show you how to swing an axe. Or," he went on
with a smile, "it will teach you how to be an efficient accountant--but
you have to use your own money!"

* * * * *

In the house on Martin's Hill, everybody won. Tim Fisher objected at
first to the idea of gallivanting off on a protracted honeymoon, leaving
a nine-year-old daughter in the care of a ten-year-old boy. But
Janet--now Mrs. Fisher--pointed out that James and Martha were both quite
competent, and furthermore there was little to be said for a honeymoon
encumbered with a little pitcher that had such big ears, to say nothing
of a pair of extremely curious eyes and a rather loud voice. And
furthermore, if we allow the woman's privilege of adding one furthermore
on top of another, it had been a long, long time since Janet had enjoyed
a child-free vacation. So she won. It was not Hawaii by air for a ten-day
stay. It was Hawaii by ship with a sixty-day sojourn in a hotel that
offered both seclusion and company to the guests' immediate preference.

James Holden won more time. He felt that every hour was a victory. At
times he despaired because time passed so crawlingly slow. All the wealth
of his education could not diminish that odd sense of the time-factor
that convinces all people that the length of the years diminish as age
increases. Far from being a simple, amusing remark, the problem has been
studied because it is universal. It is psychological, of course, and it
is not hard to explain simply in terms of human experience plus the known
fact that the human senses respond to the logarithm of the stimulus.

With most people, time is reasonably important. We live by the clock, and
we die by the clock, and before there were clocks there were candles
marked in lengths and sand flowing through narrow orifices, water
dripping into jars, and posts stuck in the ground with marks for the
shadow to divide the day. The ancient ones related womanhood to the moon
and understood that time was vital in the course of Life.

With James, time was more important, perhaps, than to any other human
being alive. He was fighting for time, always. His was not the immature
desire of uneducated youth to become adult overnight for vague reasons.

With James it was an hon