—­That Boy stood all this time looking hard at the five-cent piece.

—­Take it,—­said the Master, with a good-natured smile.

—­The Boy made a snatch at it and was off for the purpose of investing it.

—­A child naturally snaps at a thing as a dog does at his meat,—­said the Master.—–­If you think of it, we’ve all been quadrupeds.  A child that can only crawl has all the instincts of a four-footed beast.  It carries things in its mouth just as cats and dogs do.  I’ve seen the little brutes do it over and over again.  I suppose a good many children would stay quadrupeds all their lives, if they didn’t learn the trick of walking on their hind legs from seeing all the grown people walking in that way.

—­Do you accept Mr. Darwin’s notions about the origin of the race?—­said I.

The Master looked at me with that twinkle in his eye which means that he is going to parry a question.

—­Better stick to Blair’s Chronology; that settles it.  Adam and Eve, created Friday, October 28th, B. C. 4004.  You’ve been in a ship for a good while, and here comes Mr. Darwin on deck with an armful of sticks and says, “Let’s build a raft, and trust ourselves to that.”

If your ship springs a leak, what would you do?

He looked me straight in the eyes for about half a minute.—–­If I heard the pumps going, I’d look and see whether they were gaining on the leak or not.  If they were gaining I’d stay where I was.—–­Go and find out what’s the matter with that young woman.

I had noticed that the Young Girl—­the storywriter, our Scheherezade, as I called her—­looked as if she had been crying or lying awake half the night.  I found on asking her,—­for she is an honest little body and is disposed to be confidential with me for some reason or other,—­that she had been doing both.

—­And what was the matter now, I questioned her in a semi-paternal kind of way, as soon as I got a chance for a few quiet words with her.

She was engaged to write a serial story, it seems, and had only got as far as the second number, and some critic had been jumping upon it, she said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn’t bear to look at it.  He said she did not write half so well as half a dozen other young women.  She did n’t write half so well as she used to write herself.  She hadn’t any characters and she had n’t any incidents.  Then he went to work to show how her story was coming out, trying to anticipate everything she could make of it, so that her readers should have nothing to look forward to, and he should have credit for his sagacity in guessing, which was nothing so very wonderful, she seemed to think.  Things she had merely hinted and left the reader to infer, he told right out in the bluntest and coarsest way.  It had taken all the life out of her, she said.  It was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests should take a spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, “Poor stuff, poor stuff; you won’t get anything better; let’s go somewhere else where things are fit to eat.”