to occur at those particular fixed times. The notion stuck to me like a cockle-bur, and sometimes I wonder if it isn't still sticking."

"Bugs!" ranted Grislow, in good-natured ridicule, and Brouillard laughed.

"That is what I say to myself, Murray, every time the fatal period rolls around. And yet——"

"There isn't any 'and yet,'" cut in the scoffer derisively. "This is merely your night for being batty. 'Fatal period'—suffering humanity!"

"No, hold on: let me tell you, Murray—I'd like to get it out of my system if I can. Up to my seventh birthday I was a sickly child, puny and only about half alive. I recollect, as if it were only yesterday, how the neighbor women used to come in and condole with my mother, ignoring me, of course, as if I hadn't any ears. I can remember old Aunt Hetty Parsons saying, time and again: 'No, Mis' Brouillard; you'll never raise that boy the longest day you live!'"

"I'm waiting for the 'and yet,'" put in Grislow, sitting up to relight his pipe with a blazing splinter from the fire.

"It came—the change, I mean—when I was seven years old. That was the year of our removal to Vincennes from the country village where I was born. Since that time I haven't known what it means to be sick or even ailing."

"Bully old change!" applauded Grislow. "Is that all?"

"No. What the second period spent on my body it took out of my mind. I grew stouter and stronger every year and became more and more the stupidest blockhead that ever thumbed a school-book. I simply couldn't learn, Murray. My mother made excuses for me, as mothers will, but my father was in despair. He was an educated man, and I can imagine that my unconquerable doltishness went near to breaking his heart."

"You are safely over that stage of it now, at all events," said the hydrographer in exaggerated sarcasm. "Any man who can stare into the fire and think out fetching little imaginations like these you are handing me——"

"Sometimes I wish they were only imaginings, Grizzy. But let me finish. I was fourteen to a day when I squeezed through the final grammar grade; think of it—fourteen years old and still with the women teachers! I found out afterward that I got my dubiously given passport to the high school chiefly because my father was one of the best-known and best-loved men in the old home town. Perhaps it wasn't the magic seven that built me 

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