"Surely not," said Uncle Fritz, laughing. "I saw your water-proof in your shawl-strap. I know your mamma well enough to know that you would never have been permitted to come so far from home without that ægis, or without those trig, pretty overshoes. You owe waterproof and overshoes both to the steady perseverance of Goodyear and to the loyal help of his wife and daughters. Some day you must read Mr. Webster's eulogy on him and them. Indeed, he is the American Palissy. You hear a good deal of woman's rights; but, really, modern women had no rights worth speaking of till Mr. Goodyear enabled them to go out-doors in all weathers. "I meant we should have an afternoon with the Goodyears. Then I meant that you should know, Gertrude, where that slice of bread came from." "Well," said she, "I do not know much, but I do know that. It came out of the bread-box." "Very good," said the Colonel, laughing. "But somebody put it into the bread-box. And it is quite as well that you should know who put it in. American girls and American boys ought to know that men's prayer for 'Daily Bread' is answered more and more largely every year. They ought to know why. Well, the great reason is that reaping and binding after the reapers, nay, that sowing the corn, and every process between sowing and harvest, has been wellnigh perfected by the American inventors. So I had wanted to give a day or two to reapers and binders, and the other machinery of harvesting. Indeed, if our winter had been as long as poor Captain Greely's was, and if you had met me every week, we should have had a new invention for each one. Here are the telephone and the telegraph. Here is the use of the electric light. Here is the sewing-machine, with all its nice details, like the button-hole maker. Nay, every button is made by its own machinery. Here are carpets one quarter cheaper than they were only four years ago; cotton cloths made more by machinery and less by hand labor; nay, they tell us that the cotton is to be picked by a machine before long. "But these are things you must work up for yourselves. You are on a good track now, and have learned some of the principles of such study. "Go to the originals whenever you can. Read what you understand, and fall back on what you did not understand at first, so as to try it again." "Do you not think that all the great things have been invented, Uncle Fritz?" This was John Angier's rather melancholy question. "Not a bit of it, my boy. Certainly not for as keen eyes as yours and as handy hands. Let me tell you what I heard President Dawson say. He is President of McGill University, and is counted one of the first physical philosophers in America.