"Here"s to the New Year!" said Mr. Pedagog.
"Not yet," interposed the Idiot. "That"s only a signal for the Welsh rarebits to be brought in. I"ve sworn them off for the New Year, but I haven"t for the old. The clock is a half-hour fast."
"No, my dear," said Mrs. Idiot. "It was, but I put it back. It"s exactly right now."
"Then," said the Idiot, "I join you in the toast, Mr. Pedagog. Here"s to the New Year: may it bring joy to everybody. Meanwhile may it bring also the Welsh rarebits."
"I thought you"d sworn off," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"So I had," replied the Idiot, "but circ.u.mstances over which I have no control force me to postpone my reformation for another twelve months.
If they had been served at half-past eleven I should have stuck to my resolve; as they have been delayed until twelve-one I cannot do less than eat them. I do not believe in wilful waste; and besides, it is quite as much the duty of the host to consume the good things he places before his guests as it is for the guests to partake. I can wait a year, I think, without wholly ruining what little digestion my former devotion to New-Year"s calling has left me. Gentlemen, I propose the ladies: May their future be as golden as this rarebit; and for the men, may they always be worthy to be the toast upon which that golden future may rest with the certainty born of confidence."
And the guests fell to and ate each a golden buck to the New Year--all save Mollie and Tommy. These two important members of the household went up to their little beds, but just before going to sleep Tommy called through the door to his little sister:
"Mollie!"
"Yeth!"
"Want to play a game with me to-morrow?"
"Yeth!"
"Well, you get a cake and a pie and some gingersnaps and a lot of apples and some candy and we"ll play New-Year"s calls."
"Splendid!" lisped Mollie. "You"ll call on me?"
"Yes," said Tommy; "and all you"ll have to do will be to force food on me."
And they soon pa.s.sed into the land of dreams.
XII
SOME DOMESTIC INVENTIONS
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""THERE"S NOT MUCH MONEY IN STOCKS""]
"I think I"ll give up the business of broking and go into inventing,"
said the Idiot one Sunday morning, as he and Mrs. Idiot and their friends sat down at breakfast. "There"s not much money in stocks, but the successful inventor of a patent clothes-pin makes a fortune."
"I"d think twice about that before acting," observed Mr. Brief. "There may not be much money in stocks, but you can work eight hours a day, and get good pay in a broker"s office, while the inventor has to wait upon inspiration."
"True enough," said the Idiot; "but waiting on inspiration isn"t a bad business in itself. You can play golf or read a rattling good novel, or go to a yacht-race while you wait."
"But where does the money come in?" asked Mr. Pedagog, his usual caution coming to the fore.
"Inspiration brings it with her," said the Idiot, "and by the barrel, too. What"s the use of toiling eight hours a day for fifty weeks in a year for three thousand dollars when by waiting on inspiration in a pleasant way you make a million all of a sudden?"
"Well," said Mr. Pedagog, indulgently, "if you have the inspiration la.s.soed, as you might say, your argument is all right; but if you are merely going to sit down and wait for it to ring you up on the telephone, and ask you when and where you wish your barrels of gold delivered, I think it will be your creditors, and not fortune, who will be found knocking at your door. How are you going about this business, provided you do retire from Wall Street?"
"Choose my field and work it," replied the Idiot. "For the present I should choose the home. That is the field I am most interested in just now. I should study its necessities, and endeavor to meet whatever these might demand with an adequate supply. Any man who stays around home all day will find lots of room for the employment of his talents along inventive lines."
"You"ve tried it, have you?" asked Mr. Brief.
"Certainly I have," said the Idiot, "though I haven"t invented anything yet. Why, only last week I stayed home on Monday--wash-day--and a thousand things that might be invented suggested themselves to me."
"As, for instance?" asked Mrs. Idiot, who was anxious to know of any possible thing that could mitigate the horrors of wash-day.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""A NICE LITTLE BASKET-HAT ON HER HEAD TO HOLD THE PINS IN""]
"Well, it wouldn"t help _you_ much, my dear," said the Idiot, "but the wash-lady would hail with unmixed delight a subst.i.tute for her mouth to hold clothes-pins in while she is hanging out the clothes. I watched Ellen in the yard for ten minutes that day, and it was pathetic. There she was, standing on her tiptoes, hanging innumerable garments on the line, her mouth full of clothes-pins, and Jimpsonberry"s hired man leaning over the fence trying to shout sweet nothings in her ear. If she had had a nice little basket-hat on her head to hold the pins in she could have answered back without stopping her work every other minute to take them out of her mouth in order to retort to his honeyed sentiments."
Mrs. Idiot laughed. "Ellen finds time enough to talk and do the washing, too," she said. "I sometimes think she does more talking than washing."
"No doubt of it; she"s only human, like the rest of us," said the Idiot.
"But she might save time to do something else for us if she could do the washing and the talking at the same time. She may give up the washing, but she"ll never give up the talking. Therefore, why not make the talking easier?"
"What you need most, I think," put in Mr. Brief, "is an instrument to keep hired men from leaning over the fence and distracting the attention of the laundress from her work. That would be a great boon."
"Not unless idleness is a great boon," retorted the Idiot. "Half the hired men I know would be utterly out of employment if they couldn"t lean over a fence and talk to somebody. Leaning over a fence and talking to somebody forms seventy-five per cent. of the hired man"s daily labor.
He seems to think that is what he is paid for. Still, any one who objects could very easily remedy the conversational detail in so far as it goes on over the fence."
"By the use of barbed wire, I presume," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all.
Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from climbing over for a short cut home."
"With what result?" asked Mr. Brief.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""AN ELECTRIC NOTICE TO QUIT""]
"With the result that I had to buy a new pair of pruning-shears," said the Idiot. "My Anti-Over-the-Fence-Gabber," he continued, "would involve certain complex details, but it would work. I should have an electric battery connected with the upper cable of the fence, and an operator stationed inside of the house, close to a key which would send some six hundred or seven hundred volts through the cable whenever needed.
Then if I felt that Jimpsonberry"s man was interfering with my laundress, as soon as he leaned over the fence I"d have the operator send him an electric notice to quit."
"A message?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"No, a plain shock. Two hundred volts as a starter, three hundred as a reminder, and the full seven hundred if necessary to make the hint plainer."
"That would be cruel," observed Mrs. Pedagog.
"Not wholly," said the Idiot. "It would be an advantage to the man himself in one way. Hired men have too little electricity in their systems, Mrs. Pedagog. If Jimpsonberry"s man, for instance, would take all the electricity I"d give him and apply it to his work, Jimpsonberry"s unpulled dandelions would not be such a constant menace to my lawn. I compel Mike to weed out my lawn every spring and autumn, but Jimpsonberry doesn"t attend to his at all. He doesn"t sleep on it, and so doesn"t bother about it. Consequently, when his dandelions go to seed the seed is blown over into my gra.s.s, and every year I get an uninvited crop, which at a dollar a thousand would make me a millionaire."
"Why don"t you apply your inventive genius to the discovery of a seedless dandelion?" asked the Lawyer. "It seems to me that would be the best solution of the dandelion problem."
"Because Jimpsonberry wouldn"t have "em if I discovered "em," said the Idiot. "I judge from the millions he raises every year that he is satisfied with dandelions as they are. He"s got enough for himself, and never makes any charge for those he gives to his neighbors."