ing joints and whizzing fan, was aware of my incapacity to manage
it, and had a fiendish spite against me. I contracted an unconquerable
dislike to it; indeed, I had never liked, and never could learn to
like, any kind of machinery. And this machine finally conquered me. It
was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that there were some things I
could not do, and I retired from the field, vanquished.

The two things I had enjoyed in this room were that my sister was with
me, and that our windows looked toward the west. When the work was
running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to each other all
the sunset-poetry we could remember. Our tastes did not quite agree.
Her favorite description of the clouds was from Pollok:--

"They seemed like chariots of saints,
By fiery coursers drawn; as brightly hued
As if the glorious, bushy, golden locks
Of thousand cherubim had been shorn off,
And on the temples hung of morn and even."

I liked better a translation from the German, beginning

"Methinks it were no pain to die
On such an eve, while such a sky
O'ercanopies the west."

And she generally had to hear the whole poem, for I was very fond of
it; though the especial verse that I contrasted with hers was,--

"There's peace and welcome in yon sea
Of endless blue tranquillity;
Those clouds are living things;
I trace their veins of liquid gold,
And see them silently unfold
Their soft and fleecy wings."

Then she would tell me that my nature inclined to quietness and
harmony, while hers asked for motion and splendor. I wondered whether
it really were so. But that huge, creaking framework beside us would
continually intrude upon our meditations and break up our discussions,
and silence all poetry for us with its dull prose.

Emilie found more profitable work elsewhere, and I found some that was
less so, but far more satisfactory, as it would give me the openings of
leisure which I craved.

The paymaster asked, when I left, "Going where on can earn more money?"

"No," I answered, "I am going where I can have more time." "Ah, yes!"
he said sententiously, "time is money." But that was not my thought
about it. "Time is education," I said to myself; for that was what I
meant it should be to me.

Perhaps I never gave the wage-earning element in work its due weight.
It always seemed to me that the Apostle's idea about worldly
possessions was the only sensible one,--

"Having food and