of their
own in the suburbs. The father worked as Beelzebub mostly, but he could
double with St. Anthony and do a very fair St. Luke when it was called
for. The mother worked as Mary Magdalene, but had grown so stout that it
was hard for her to hold it. There were two boys, one of whom was
working as John the Baptist, but had been promised to be promoted to
Judas Iscariot in the fall; they were good people, and worked well, but
were tired of their present place. Like everyone else they had heard of
Canada and thought of coming out. They were very anxious to know what
openings there were in their line; whether there would be any call for a
Judas Iscariot in a Canadian restaurant, or whether a man would have any
chance as St. Anthony in the West.

I told them frankly that these jobs were pretty well filled up.

Listen! It is striking three. The motors are whirling down the asphalt
street. The brilliant lights of the boulevard windows are fading out.
Here, as in the silent woods of Canada, night comes at last. The
restless city of pleasure settles to its short sleep.

_THE RETROACTIVE EXISTENCE OF MR. JUGGINS_

_The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins_

I FIRST met Juggins,--really to notice him,--years and years ago as a
boy out camping. Somebody was trying to nail up a board on a tree for a
shelf and Juggins interfered to help him.

"Stop a minute," he said, "you need to saw the end of that board off
before you put it up." Then Juggins looked round for a saw, and when he
got it he had hardly made more than a stroke or two with it before he
stopped. "This saw," he said, "needs to be filed up a bit." So he went
and hunted up a file to sharpen the saw, but found that before he could
use the file he needed to put a proper handle on it, and to make a
handle he went to look for a sapling in the bush, but to cut the sapling
he found that he needed to sharpen up the axe. To do this, of course, he
had to fix the grindstone so as to make it run properly. This involved
making wooden legs for the grindstone. To do this decently Juggins
decided to make a carpenter's bench. This was quite impossible without a
better set of tools. Juggins went to the village to get the tools
required, and, of course, he never came back.

He was re-discovered--weeks later--in the city, getting prices on
wholesale tool machinery.

After that first episode I got to know Juggins very well. For some time
we were students at college