"Oh yes!" cried Mr. Pedagog. "You have a father, haven't you? I had forgotten that."

"Wherein," said the Idiot, "we differ. I haven't forgotten that I have one, and, by-the-way, it is from him that I first heard of University Extension. He lives in a small manufacturing town not many miles from here, and is distinguished in the town because, without being stingy, he lives within his means. He has a way of paying his grocer's bills which makes of him a marked man. He hasn't much more money than he needs, but when the University Extension movement reached the town he was interested. The prime movers in the enterprise went to him and asked him if he wouldn't help it along, dilating upon the benefits which would accrue to those whose education stopped short with graduation from the high-schools. It was most plausible. The notion that for ten cents a lecture the working masses could learn something about art, history, and letters, could gather in something about the sciences, and all that, appealed to him, and while he could afford it much more ill than the smart people, the four hundred of the town, he chipped in. He paid fifty dollars and was made an honorary manager. He was proud enough of it, too, and he wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to me about it. It was a great thing, and he hoped the State, which had been appealed to to help the movement along, would take a hand in it. 'If we educate the masses to understand and to appreciate the artistic, the beautiful,' he wrote, 'we need have little fear for the future. Ignorance is the greatest foe we have to contend against in our national development, and it is the only thing that can overthrow a nation such as ours is.' And then what happened? Professor Peterkin came along and delivered ten or a dozen lectures. The masses went once or twice and found the platform occupied by a man who talked to them about Romanticism and Realism; who told them that Dickens was trash; who exalted Tolstoi and Ibsen; but who never let them into the secret of what Romanticism was, and who kept them equally in the dark as to the significance of Realism. They also found the best seats in the lecture-hall occupied by the smart set in full evening-dress, who talked almost as much and as loudly as did Professor Peterkin. The masses did not even learn manners at Professor Peterkin's first and second lectures, and the third and fourth found them conspicuous by their absence. All they learned was that they were ignorant, and that other people were better than they, and what my father learned was that he had subscribed fifty dollars to promote a series of social functions for the diversion of the four hundred and the aggrandizement of Professor Peterkin. He started in for what might be 

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