"You, Yorpy, take your black hoof from under the box!" This gust of passion on the part of my uncle made the matter seem still more dubious and dark. It was a bad symptom, I thought. "Surely you _can_ tip it just a _leetle_ more!" "Not a hair, uncle." "Blast and blister the cursed box then!" roared my uncle, in a terrific voice, sudden as a squall. Running at the box, he dashed his bare foot into it, and with astonishing power all but crushed in the side. Then seizing the whole box, he disemboweled it of all its anacondas and adders, and, tearing and wrenching them, flung them right and left over the water. "Hold, hold, my dear, dear uncle!--do for heaven's sake desist. Don't destroy so, in one frantic moment, all your long calm years of devotion to one darling scheme. Hold, I conjure!" Moved by my vehement voice and uncontrollable tears, he paused in his work of destruction, and stood steadfastly eyeing me, or rather blankly staring at me, like one demented. "It is not yet wholly ruined, dear uncle; come put it together now. You have hammer and wrench; put it together again, and try it once more. While there is life there is hope." "While there is life hereafter there is _despair_," he howled. "Do, do now, dear uncle--here, here, put those pieces together; or, if that can't be done without more tools, try a _section_ of it--that will do just as well. Try it once; try, uncle." My persistent persuasiveness told upon him. The stubborn stump of hope, plowed at and uprooted in vain, put forth one last miraculous green sprout. Steadily and carefully pulling out of the wreck some of the more curious-looking fragments, he mysteriously involved them together, and then, clearing out the box, slowly inserted them there, and ranging Yorpy and me as before, bade us tip the box once again. We did so; and as no perceptible effect yet followed, I was each moment looking for the previous command to tip the box over yet more, when, glancing into my uncle's face, I started aghast. It seemed pinched, shriveled into mouldy whiteness, like a mildewed grape. I dropped the box, and sprang toward him just in time to prevent his fall. Leaving the woeful box where we had dropped it, Yorpy and I helped the old man into the skiff and silently pulled from Quash Isle. How swiftly the current now swept us down! How hardly before had we striven to stem it! I thought of my poor uncle's saying, not an hour gone by, about the universal drift of the mass of humanity toward utter oblivion. "Boy!" said my uncle at last, lifting his head. I looked at him earnestly, and was gladdened to see that the terrible blight of his face had almost departed. "Boy, there's not much left in an old world for an old man to invent." I said nothing. "Boy, take my advice, and never try to invent anything but--happiness." I said nothing. "Boy, about ship, and pull back for the box." "Dear uncle!"