Chapter 9

"I've just been reading a book," began the Idiot.

"I thought you looked rather pale," said the School-master.

"Yes," returned the Idiot, cheerfully, "it made me feel pale. It was
about the pleasures of country life; and when I contrasted rural
blessedness as it was there depicted with urban life as we live it, I
felt as if my youth were being thrown away. I still feel as if I were
wasting my sweetness on the desert air."

"Why don't you move?" queried the Bibliomaniac, suggestively.

"If I were purely selfish I should do so at once, but I am, like my good
friend Mr. Whitechoker, a slave to duty. I deem it my duty to stay here
to keep the School-master fully informed in the various branches of
knowledge which are day by day opened up, many of which seem to be so
far beyond the reach of one of his conservative habits; to assist Mr.
Whitechoker in his crusades against vice at this table and elsewhere; to
give the Bibliomaniac the benefit of my advice in regard to those
precious little tomes he no longer buys--to make life worth the living
for all of you, to say nothing of enabling Mrs. Smithers to keep up the
extraordinarily high standard of this house by means of the hard-earned
stipend I pay to her every Monday morning."

"Every Monday?" queried the School-master.

"Every Monday," returned the Idiot. "That is, of course, every Monday
that I pay. The things one gets to eat in the country, the air one
breathes, the utter freedom from restraint, the thousand and more things
one enjoys in the suburbs that are not attainable here--it is these that
make my heart yearn for the open."

[Illustration: "'A LITTLE GARDEN OF MY OWN, WHERE I COULD RAISE AN
OCCASIONAL CAN OF TOMATOES'"]

"Well, it's all rot," said the School-master, impatiently. "Country life
is ideal only in books. Books do not tell of running for trains through
blinding snowstorms; writers do not expatiate on the delights of
waking on cold winter nights and finding your piano and parlor furniture
afloat because of bursted pipes, with the plumber, like Sheridan at
Winchester, twenty miles away. They are dumb on the subject of the
ecstasy one feels when pushing a twenty-pound lawn-mower up and down a
weed patch at the end of a wearisome hot summer's day. They are
silent--"

"Don't get excited, Mr. Pedagog, please," interrupted the Idiot. "I am
not contemplating leaving you and Mrs. Smithers, but I do pine for a
little garden of my own, where I could raise an occasional can of
tomatoes. I dream sometimes of getting milk fresh from the pump, instead
of twenty-four hours after it has been