The Little City of Hope | Page 6

thinking of the tangent-balance, his wife, his boy, and the coming Christmas, all together, since he had got home, and the three problems had got mixed and had made his head ache.
Nevertheless he looked up from his work-table and smiled when his son came in.
"Everything all right?" he asked, with an attempt to be cheerful.
"Oh yes, fine," answered the boy, looking at the motionless model for the five-hundredth time, and sticking his hands into his pockets. "I'm only third in mathematics yet, but I'm head in everything else. I wish I had your brains, father! I'd be at the head of the arithmetic class in half a shake of a lamb's tail if I had your brains."
So far as mathematics were concerned this sounded probable to John Henry, who would have considered the speed of the tail to be a variable function of lamb, depending on the value of mother, plus or minus milk.
"Well," he said in an encouraging tone, "I never could remember geography, so it makes us even."
"I'd like to know how!" cried the boy in a tone of protest. "You could do sums, and you grew up to be a great mathematician and inventor. But what is the good of a geographician, anyway? They can only make school-books. They never invent anything, do they? You can't invent geography, can you? At least you can, and some boys do, but they go to the bottom of the class like lead. It's safer to invent history than geography, isn't it, father?"
Overholt's clever mouth twitched.
"It's much safer, my boy. Almost all historians have found it so."
"There! I said so to-day, and now you say just the same thing. I don't believe one word of ancient history. Not--one--word! They wrote it about their own nations, didn't they? All right. Then you might just as well expect them to tell what really happened, as think that I'd tell on another boy in my own school. I must say it would be as mean as dog pie of them if they did, but all the same that does not make history true, does it?"
Newton had a practical mind. His father, who had not, meditated with unnecessary gravity on the boy's point of view and said nothing.
"For instance," continued the lad, sitting down on the high stool before the lathe Overholt was not using, "the charge of Balaclava's a true story, because it's been told by both sides; but they all say that it did no good, anyway, except to make poetry of. But Marathon! Nobody had a chance to say a word about it except the Greeks themselves, and they weren't going to allow that the Persians wiped up the floor with them, were they? Why should they? And if Balaclava had happened then, those Greek fellows would have told us that the Light Brigade carried the Russian guns back with them across their saddles, wouldn't they? I say, father!"
"What is it?" asked Overholt, looking up, for he had gone back to his work and was absorbed in it.
"The boys are all beginning to talk about Christmas down at the school. Now what are we going to do at Christmas? I've been wondering."
"So have I!" responded the man, laying down the screw-plate with which he was about to cut a fine thread on the end of a small brass rod for the tangent-balance. "I've been thinking about it a good deal to-day, and I haven't decided on anything."
"Let's have turkey and cranberry sauce, anyway," said Newton thoughtfully, for he had a practical mind. "And I suppose we can have ice-cream if it freezes and we can get some ice. Snow does pretty well if you pack it down tight enough with salt, and go on putting in more when it melts. Barbara doesn't make ice-cream as well as they do in New York. She puts in a lot of winter-green and too little cocoanut. But it's not so bad. We can have it, can't we, father?"
"Oh yes. Turkey, cranberry sauce, and ice-cream. But that isn't a whole Christmas!"
"I don't see what else you want, I'm sure," answered the boy thoughtfully. "I mean if it's a big turkey and there's enough ice-cream--cream-cakes, maybe. You get good cream-cakes at Bangs's, two for five cents. They're not very big, but they're all right inside--all gooey, you know. Can you think of anything else?"
"Not to eat!"
"Oh, well then, what's the matter with our Christmas? I can't see. No school and heaps of good gobbles."
"Good what?" Overholt looked at the boy with an inquiring glance, and then understood. "I see! Is that the proper word?"
"When there's lots, it is," answered Newton with conviction. "Of course, there are all sorts of things I'd like to have, but it's no good wishing you could lay Columbus's egg and hatch the