He knew we were waiting for him, but that didn’t make a bit of difference. If General Grant and the Emperor Napoleon were hanging around waiting for him to come out and play tag with them, he’d have eaten just as much and not a mite faster. When you weigh as much as he does I calc’late it takes more to keep you going, just like it takes more wood to run a big stove than it does a little one. It didn’t take him much more than an hour to get his stummick filled up this time, and out he waddled, looking kind of pleased and peaceful, with his hand resting gentle on his belt. “Um!...” says he. “Hope you didn’t hustle out before you got plenty,” says I. He looked at me out of his little eyes that had to sort of peer over the tops of his dumpling cheeks. “Plunk,” says he, “if you d-d-do everythin’ in your l-life as thorough as I eat, folks is goin’ to admire you consid’able. I started in with vegetable soup at six o’clock, and I don’t recall neglectin’ a dish from that to apple pie. Two pieces of apple pie,” says he. “It’s lucky,” says Binney, “that your pa’s rich. If he wasn’t he couldn’t afford to keep you. A poor fam’ly would have to drown you in a pail of water like folks does kittens they can’t figger to take care of.” “Take a kind of big pail of water,” said Tallow. “Guess they’d need the village standpipe.” “How’s your pa and ma?” says I. “Oh,” says Mark, “Ma she’s b-b-busy, as usual. Just a-hustlin’ from git-up to go-to bed. Claims she’s p-plumb tired out, but the tireder she gets the harder she works. She just sent Dad out to put over the kittle while she cleared the table.” “Did he do it?” says I. Mark grinned. “When I l-looked through the kitchen door,” says he, “Dad he’d gone and set the dust-pan careful on the stove, and was settin’ in front of the stove, a-holdin’ the kittle in his lap and restin’ a volume of Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ on top of it. You could ’a’ hollered fire and he wouldn’t budge.” That was Mr. Tidd all over. He was one of these inventor folks, and that dreamy and absent-minded you wouldn’t believe it. Always a-thinking about something besides what he ought to be thinking about, and always getting into trouble with Mrs. Tidd—and forever reading the _Decline and Fall_. There’s eight volumes of it, and I’ll bet he can recite it word for word. Yes, sir, if Mrs. Tidd was to send him to the store for a pound of tea, as like as not he would come home bringin’ a knife-sharpener or a box of cough-drops or a sick dog. Mrs. Tidd always figgered on sendin’ him at least twice for anything—and then, ’most generally, she had to send one of us boys to git it, after all. And he was rich. Made so much money out of inventin’ a turbine engine that he’s got a bank full of it. But you’d never think it. Why, him and Mrs. Tidd lives just like they did when he didn’t have two dollars to his name. He dresses just the same, and she won’t even keep a hired girl. Fine folks, I can tell you, and us fellows think a heap of them.