At this moment a dripping sponge came spinning through the air and struck the young irreconcilable squarely between the shoulders. "If Pee-wee Davis threw that sponge I'll skin him alive," announced Slops wrathfully. Instantly the air was filled with flying sponges. Towels, like dripping comets, passed and re-passed, while Doc Cubberly came hobbling in, threatening, imploring and dodging stray missiles. Skippy, safe below the surface, watched this bombardment swing over head, die out and silence return. One by one his fellow prisoners emerged, vociferous, hilarious, and passed moist and voicing imprecations into the outer region. Still Skippy continued gorgeously to steam and doze. Then a sharp rat-tat-tat on the door. "Mr. Bedelle?" "Hello, Doc!" "Time's up." "All right, almost dressed. Coming fast." The crucial moment had arrived, the tragic end to all happiness below, that inevitable moment when he must, by some supreme exercise of the will, rise out of this blissful warmth and stretch a reluctant arm through the chilly air to let in the cold water. End of dreams and chill return of reality! He temporized. A second time Doc Cubberly's sliding step arrived. "Mr. Bedelle--Mr. Bee-delle!" "Just buttoning on my collar, Doc!" For the hundredth time, one foot slowly emerged and five over-civilized toes sought in vain to turn the round faucet labeled "Cold." A hundred, yes a thousand times, he had attempted the apelike expedient before the final mental determination to rise out of the warm spell into the frigid air. "Gee, if I could only turn that with my foot," he said. "Lord, what a cinch that would be!" He tried a last ineffectual time, jerked up precipitately, shot out his arm, let in the cold water and dodged back below the surface. CHAPTER II BIRTH OF AN IDEA TEN minutes later he sidled out of the bath and, having balanced Doc Cubberly's Grand Army hat on the gas jet, and simulated an attack on Tippy, the black and tan, escaped before the guardian of the bath could return to the rescue of his pet. "All the same, you ought to be able to work a bathtub with your foot," he said as he went skipping towards the village with heightened appetite. "Gee, that _would_ be scrumptious!" Suddenly a queer thought came to him. After all--why not? All you needed was a foot regulator, to let in the hot and cold water gorgeously, at your ease and inclination! Foot regulators! Why not? There was something in that idea surely. "Gee, what a cinch that _would_ be!" If man in his age-old struggle with nature could harness the force of steam to his service and ride the air, why should he not be master of his daily comforts? "I don't think a foot regulator would be so ding fired hard to invent," he said, meditating.