Then, turning to the Traveling Salesman, he mused reminiscently:  “Talking’s—­all—­right.  But where in creation do you get the time to think?  Got any kids?” he asked abruptly.

“N-o,” said the Traveling Salesman.  “My wife, I guess, is kid enough for me.”

Around the Young Electrician’s eyes the whimsical smile-wrinkles deepened with amazing vividness.  “Huh!” he said.  “I’ve got six.”

“Gee!” chuckled the Salesman.  “Boys?”

The Young Electrician’s eyebrows lifted in astonishment.  “Sure they’re boys!” he said.  “Why, of course!”

The Traveling Salesman looked out far away through the window and whistled a long, breathy whistle.  “How in the deuce are you ever going to take care of ’em?” he asked.  Then his face sobered suddenly.  “There was only two of us fellows at home—­just Daniel and me—­and even so—­there weren’t ever quite enough of anything to go all the way round.”

For just an instant the Youngish Girl gazed a bit skeptically at the Traveling Salesman’s general rotund air of prosperity.

“You don’t look—­exactly like a man who’s never had enough,” she said smilingly.

“Food?” said the Traveling Salesman.  “Oh, shucks!  It wasn’t food I was thinking of.  It was education.  Oh, of course,” he added conscientiously, “of course, when the crops weren’t either too heavy or too blooming light, Pa usually managed some way or other to get Daniel and me to school.  And schooling was just nuts to me, and not a single nut so hard or so green that I wouldn’t have chawed and bitten my way clear into it.  But Daniel—­Daniel somehow couldn’t seem to see just how to enter a mushy Bartlett pear without a knife or a fork—­in some other person’s fingers.  He was all right, you know—­but he just couldn’t seem to find his own way alone into anything.  So when the time came—­” the grin on the Traveling Salesman’s mouth grew just a little bit wry at one corner—­“and so when the time came—­it was an awful nice, sweet-smelling June night, I remember, and I’d come home early—­I walked into the kitchen as nice as pie, where Pa was sitting dozing in the cat’s rocking-chair, in his gray stocking feet, and I threw down before him my full year’s school report.  It was pink, I remember, which was supposed to be the rosy color of success in our school; and I says:  ‘Pa!  There’s my report!  And Pa,’ I says, as bold and stuck-up as a brass weathercock on a new church, ’Pa!  Teacher says that one of your boys has got to go to college!’ And I was grinning all the while, I remember, worse than any Chessy cat.

“And Pa he took my report in both his horny old hands and he spelt it all out real careful and slow and respectful, like as though it had been a lace valentine, and ‘Good boy!’ he says, and ‘Bully boy!’ and ’So Teacher says that one of my boys has got to go to college?  One of my boys?  Well, which one?  Go fetch me Daniel’s report.’  So I went and fetched him Daniel’s report.  It was gray,