mperor's voice and say:

"The Big-'W' Work you love to do _must_ be done by hand. It _can't_ be
done any other way. That is why you were given thumbs, when the other
beasts got none."

So Andy found it was no use quarreling with the tools. He looked at his
hands, holding them up before him, and he thought: "Well, the Voice is
right. My hands wouldn't be any good without my thumbs. I have hands and
thumbs both and surely they were given me for the reason the Voice
mentions. At any rate, I know no better."

That made Andy set to work all the harder, for the idea of
Thumb-and-Craft was new to him; and that made his craft very interesting
to him, so that he became determined to stick to it until he got the
beauty out of it. (All the same, it was a frightfully backward Summer
that year; and nobody--except Andy--thought very well of her.)

He found indeed that he would have to work as fast as his fingers could
go. For the little Summer grew big and bigger in an amazingly short
time; and she kept throwing things away as fast as she put them on just
as the Voice had foretold.

Her days, though, went happily along, all full of sweet smells out of
cups and umbels of flowers and from the liquor of the leaves as they
steeped in the hot sun; and Andy himself felt quite happy (when he
wasn't terribly interested in his Work, and then he paid attention to
nothing at all save what was between his thumb and forefinger). But
while he worked and the Summer danced or dozed and grew before him, he
noticed something he had never noticed until then--As the Summer grew
older, she kept asking him for darker blues. While she was little she
had liked light greens, but week by week as time went on she insisted
more and more that he put in plenty of blue.

"Bluer and bluer," muttered Andy, and a wee shot of pain hit his heart.
"Yes, it's bluer and bluer, all right, I know. And finally some day
'twill all be steel-blue everywhere--in the snow-drifts and in the
skies--and neither the lass nor I will be here then."

Well may you believe that the departing of that first Summer was a sad
matter to him. He had done his best, you see, and a whole new world of
trying had been thrown open to him. And really he was beginning to get
the knack of that kind of weaving. And she was a fine big apple-cheeked
woman now, and--

"Well, if I do say it myself," growled Andy, "she looks very handsome in
those dresses; and for the first time in my life I take a P