ething?" queried the girl. "What is it?"

"To make money," he answered. "Simmer it down and that's all there is to
life."

In her heart she agreed with him, but she took issue. She said that
there was something better than money. He asked if it were an old mill,
and they laughed themselves into better acquaintance.

"It would be well to sit here," said the Professor to Milford, "but I
want you to go up to my work shop with me. I wish to show you
something."

As Milford arose to follow him, he thought that on the woman's face he
saw a sneer at "work shop," and he felt that she and her daughter had
learned to look upon it as an idle corner, full of useless lumber. The
schemes of this ducking failure of a man were not of serious interest to
them. His readiness to talk made him seem light of purpose, and a sigh
that came from his heart might have been an unuttered word breathed upon
the air, a word in excuse of his poverty.

Milford was conducted to an upper room, furnished with two chairs, a
worn carpet and a table. But the Professor entered it reverently, as if
it were the joss-house of hope. He turned down his light to steady the
flame, placed the lamp upon the table, motioned his visitor to a chair,
sat down, drew a pile of papers toward him, and said: "My dear fellow, I
think I have something here that will tide me over the quarterly rapids.
I believe that among these sheets lie a life insurance premium of
ninety-seven dollars and forty cents. I want you to hear it, and then I
will steal it forth to that woman. Now, in writing for a professional
man, a physician, we will say, you must of all things employ
sky-scraping terms. Medicine has no use for the simple. I wanted to
start off with a cloud-capped sentence, a quotation, and here is one I
found in Hazlett, referring to old Sir Thomas Brown: 'He scooped an
antithesis from fabulous antiquity and raked up an epithet from the
sweepings of chaos.' Isn't that a wild pigeon with the sun on its back?"

"Yes, I know, but what has it to do with an article on medicine?"

"Everything. Now let me tell you something. In a paper of this sort you
must take a text, and with sophistry draw your deductions. You must
never be clear. In the opinion of the world involution is depth. It
takes a simple book a hundred years to become a classic. The writer has
starved to death. He sleeps under marble. And who is it that is lost out
there among the briars? The man who wrote the pampere