Men and their works are indeed inconsistent. The primitive savage who dwelt at home went to a foreign land when he moved his tent or paddled his log canoe across the stream; but civilized man, with his machines, inventions, and contrivances, has brought the world into such close connection that we must journey almost around the earth to find something new and strange. Not time and space alone, but also men and women, were illusive to our young minds. My Sunday-school teacher, a fat asthmatic woman, who always held her lesson-paper between her stiff thumb and finger covered with a black glove, seemed a wonderful personage to me. How was it possible she could know so much about Palestine and Jerusalem and Judæa and the Dead Sea? Surely she had never visited these mythical realms, for there was no way to go. As easily might she have gone to the moon, or to some of the fixed stars; and still she talked of these things with the familiarity with which she would have spoken of a neighboring town. I never had any idea that she was like a common woman, until one day when I went to her house and found her with her sleeves rolled up and a great apron reaching clear around her dress, and she was washing clothes. After that, the spell was broken. How could anyone wash clothes if she really knew about Paul and John the Baptist and the river Jordan? All the grown-up men seemed strange and unreal to my mind, and to have nothing in common with the boys. No matter what we did, we thought that if any man should come around he had a right promptly to make us stop. Most of the men never seemed to notice us, unless to forbid our doing certain things, or to ask us to turn a grindstone while they sharpened an axe or a scythe; and there were only a very few who even knew our names. Once in a long while some man would call me “that Smith boy,” but even then he seemed a little doubtful who I really was. If now and then a grown-up man took a friendly interest in our sports, or called us by our first names, we liked him, and would have voted for him for President of the United States if we could have had the chance.