The first was that there was no money for the tangent balance of the
Air-Motor, which was the final part, on which he had spent months of
hard work and a hundred more than half sleepless nights.

The second was that he had not seen his wife for nearly a year, and had
no idea how long it would be before he saw her again, and he was just as
much in love with her as he had been fourteen years ago, when he married
her.

The third, and not the least, was that Christmas was coming, and he did
not see how in the world he was to make a Christmas out of nothing for
Newton, seeing that a thirteen-year-old boy wants everything under the
sun to cheer him up when he has no brothers and sisters, and school is
closed for the holidays, and his mother is away from home, and there is
nobody but a dear old tiresome father who has his nose over a lathe all
day long unless he is blinding himself with calculating quaternions for
some reason that no lad, and very few men, can possibly understand. John
Henry was obliged to confess that hope was not much of a Christmas
present for a boy in Newton's surroundings.

For the surroundings would be dismal in the extreme. A rickety cottage
on an abandoned Connecticut farm that is waiting for a Bohemian emigrant
to make it pay is not a gay place, especially when two-thirds of the
house has been turned into a workshop that smells everlastingly of
smith's coal, brass filings, and a nauseous chemical which seemed to be
necessary to the life of the Air-Motor, and when the rest of the house
is furnished in a style that would make a condemned cell look attractive
by contrast.