came in to supplement his wife's sewing, and add an occasional day or
two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than
ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of
their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow,
sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when
any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into kindling-
wood, more than once he "minded" a baby when its mother left its
perambulator outside a store. But at eight or nine years of age one's
pay is in proportion to one's size. Tembarom, however, had neither
his father's bitter eye nor his mother's discouraged one. Something
different from either had been reincarnated in him from some more
cheerful past. He had an alluring grin instead--a grin which curled
up his mouth and showed his sound, healthy, young teeth,--a lot of
them,--and people liked to see them.

At the beginning of the world it is only recently reasonable to
suppose human beings were made with healthy bodies and healthy minds.
That of course was the original scheme of the race. It would not have
been worth while to create a lot of things aimlessly ill made. A
journeyman carpenter would not waste his time in doing it, if he knew
any better. Given the power to make a man, even an amateur would make
him as straight as he could, inside and out. Decent vanity would
compel him to do it. He would be ashamed to show the thing and admit
he had done it, much less people a world with millions of like proofs
of incompetence. Logically considered, the race was built straight
and clean and healthy and happy. How, since then, it has developed in
multitudinous less sane directions, and lost its normal straightness
and proportions, I am, singularly enough, not entirely competent to
explain with any degree of satisfactory detail. But it cannot be
truthfully denied that this has rather generally happened. There are