From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now replied--with a mind that had repudiated genius:-- "Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they _do_ seem to have done an unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century. The boy before replying deliberated as always. "They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always _the sinners_ who got _the meat_!" Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself. "How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes? How _could_ they? At one of those fish dinners!" "They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with brilliant clearness--saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes. "And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?" "Nothing is said about crumbs; they were fragments." "But if I've got to believe it, I've got to think how they did it! I've _got_ to! If I can't think of it as it is, I must think of it as it isn't! But I can't do anything with the loaves; I give up the bread. However, I think those two fish might have been leviathans. That would be only two thousand five hundred people to each leviathan. Many of them might not have liked leviathan. I wouldn't have wanted any! They could have skipped me! They could have had my slice! And the babies--they didn't want _much_! Anyhow, that's the best I can do for the fish"; and he had his laugh also--not an incessant ripple like hers, but a music issuing from the depths of him through joy in the things he saw. Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks with him. "Don't begin to be _peculiar_, Herbert. You are too young to be _peculiar_. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement.