“I don’t like a blue funk,” he said, “and generally I can find something to be thankful for at this season; but I’m blest if this year, beyond the fact that we’re all alive, I can see any cause for celebrating my thankfulness.  I haven’t enough of it to last ten minutes, much less a day, what with the positive failure of my inventions, the loss of income from what I once considered safe investments that have gone to the wall, and the reduction of my professional earnings, not to mention the fact that almost at the beginning of my professional year I am as tired physically and mentally as I ought to be at the finish.”

“Oh, well, say you are thankful, anyhow,” suggested Mrs. Jarley.  “You will convince others that you are, and maybe, if you say it often enough, you will convince yourself of the fact.”

“Thanks,” said Jarley.  “It’s possibly a good suggestion, but I don’t believe in pretending to be what I’m not.  It might convince me that I am thankful for something, but I don’t want to be convinced when I know I’m not.”

Which shows, I think, how very blue Jarley was.

“There’s one thing,” he added, with a sigh of relief at the thought—­“I’ll have a day of rest to-morrow anyhow.  I’ve bought Jack a football, and he can take it out on the tennis-court and play with it all day, with intervals for meals.”

“Why did you do that?” asked Mrs. Jarley, with a gesture not so much of indignation as of disapproval.  “I think football is such a brutal game; and if Jack has a football at his present age, when he’s in college he’ll want to play.  I don’t want to have my boy wearing his hair like a Comanche Indian, and coming home with broken ribs and dislocated limbs.”

“We’ll let the broken ribs of 1904 and the wig of the same period suffice for the evils of that year,” retorted Jarley.  “It’s the present I’m looking after, not the future ten or twelve years removed.  If Jack hasn’t that football to-morrow he’ll have me, and I’ve no desire in the present condition of my physical well-being to be used by him as a plaything.  Deprived of the leathern ball, he might use me as a football instead, and I must rest.  That’s all there is about it.  Besides, if he becomes an aspirant for football honors now it will be a good thing for him.  He’ll take care of himself and try to improve his physique if he once gets the notion in his head that he wants to go on a university eleven.  I want my boy to learn to be a man, and the football ambition is likely to be a very useful aid in that direction.  He knits reins very well with a spool and a pin now, and I think it’s time he graduated in that art, unless the woman of the future, of whom we hear so much, is to take man’s place to such an extent that the man will have to take up woman’s work.  If I thought the masculine tendency of our present-day girls was likely to go much further, I might consent to the effemination of Jack simply to secure his comfort as a married man of the future; but I don’t think that, and in consequence Jack is going to be brought up as a boy, and not as a girl.  The football goes.”