can blame a healthy boy for eating then, if he can only bear the pain.
And he can, and does, bear it nobly, though with awful faces. The little
beast knows that all toothaches do not make your cheek swell. Then there
is earache; that is a splendid invention; it goes through your head like
a red-hot corkscrew with a powerful brakeman at the other end, turning
it steadily--between meals. Only certain kinds of things really serve to
make him stop. Ice-cream is one, and it takes a great deal of it. It is
well known that ice will cool a red-hot corkscrew.

But this is a digression, for no boy ever has any pain at Christmas; it
is only afterwards that it comes on; usually about ten days.

After an hour Overholt came to the conclusion that he had better take
Pandora's box out to the cottage and sit on it there, since nothing
suggested itself to him, in spite of his immense good-will to accept any
suggestion which the spirit of coming Christmas might be kind enough to
offer; and if he could do nothing else, he could at least work at his
machine, and try to devise some means of constructing the
tangent-balance, with the materials he had left, and perhaps, by the
time he was thoroughly grimy and the workshop smelt like the Biblical
bottomless pit, something would occur to him for Newton.

He could also write a letter to his wife, a sort of anticipatory
Christmas letter, and send her the book he had bought as a little gift,
wrapping it in nice white paper first, tied with a bit of pale green
ribband which she had left behind her, and which he had cherished nearly
a year, and marking it "to be opened on Christmas morning"; and the
parcel should then be done up securely in good brown grocer's paper and
addressed to her, and even registered, so that it could not possibly be
lost. It was a pretty book, and also a very excellent book, which he