Then the next year I shall study poetry, the next astronomy, and the next botany.  Thus I shall come to know the plants of earth, the stars of heaven, and the emotions of men.  That ought to ward off ennui and afford entertainment without the aid of the saloon.  In the succeeding twelve years I shall want to acquire as many languages, for I am eager to excel Elihu Burritt in linguistic attainments even if I must yield to him as a disciple of Vulcan.  If I can learn a language and read the literature of that language each year, possibly some college may be willing to grant me a degree for work in absentia.  If not, I shall poke along the best I can and try to drown my grief in more copious drafts of work.

And I shall have quite enough to do, for mathematics, the sciences, and the arts and crafts all lie ahead of me in my programme.  I plainly see that I have played my last game of tiddledywinks and solitaire.  But I’ll have fun anyhow.  If I gain a half-year in each twelve-month as I have my programme mapped out, in seventy years I shall have a net gain of thirty-five years.  Then, when Atropos comes along with her scissors to snip the thread, thinking I have reached my threescore and ten, I shall laugh in her face and let her know, between laughs, that I am really one hundred and five, and have played a thirty-five-year joke on her.  Then I shall quote Bacon at her to clinch the joke:  “A man may be young in years but old in hours if he have lost no time.”

CHAPTER XXX

FOUR-LEAF CLOVER

I have no ambition to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an iconoclast.  To aspire in either of these directions is bad for the digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much that is desirable in human affairs.  Introspection has its uses, to be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as an objective.  A stomach is a valuable asset if only one is not conscious of it.  One of the emoluments of schoolmastering is the opportunity it affords for communing with elect souls whose very presence is a tonic.  Will is one of these.  He has a way of shunting my introspection over to the track of the head or the heart.  He just talks along and the first thing I know the heart is singing its way through and above the storm, while the head has been connected up to the heart, and they are doing team-work that is good for me and good for all who meet me.  At church I like to have them sing the hymn whose closing couplet is: 

  “I’ll drop my burden at his feet
  And bear a song away.”

I come out strong in singing that couplet, for I like it.  In a human sense, that is just what happens when I chat with Will for an hour.  When I ask him for bread, he never gives me a stone.  On the contrary, he gives me good, white bread, and a bit of cake, besides.