“Yes,” said Mr. Barry--and Leacraft watched him with eager eyes, and listened with critical ears--“Nature has a happy way of discriminating between shame and compassion. She tries to make up for her cruelties by some new blessing, but she never tells anybody that her cruelties ever made her blush. If this news is a portent of worse; if the canal should be destroyed, if the isthmus is invaded by the oceans, a canal without locks will be given to us free of charge.” “And we have spent one hundred and thirty million dollars already. As a financial proposition, it is hard to see why we have not paid as much for one as for the other,” dryly commented Mr. Garrett. Leacraft felt it incumbent upon him to say something, and his fatal over-valuation of seriousness allured his tongue into a statement statistical and scientific, something which might impress Sally--but which only afflicted that young degenerate person with an immoderate preference for the way her cousin, Brig Barry, might have said the same thing. “I am rather curiously reminded,” began Leacraft, “of a lecture which I heard in Washington last April, in which the lecturer, Mr. Binn, ventured to offer a very alarming prediction as to the instability of the Central American zone, and especially the portions of it embraced in the isthmus. He was rebuked at the time in open meeting by a Senator, but if your information turns out to be correct, perhaps he is about to receive a stunning corroboration. It would be of some psychological interest to know whether Mr. Binn in that case preferred his own reputation to his country’s welfare.” “I heard of Binn’s talk,” remarked Brig Barry. “I was near the Mexican line, and we had had a brush with some greasers which were kicking at Uncle Sam’s tariff. A Washington paper turned up in camp, and there was Binn’s Jeremiad. I think the paper had it ‘Science Butting In,’” and, to Leacraft’s surprise, Sally laughed. But a moment later she turned to Leacraft with unaffected interest, and said, “But, Mr. Leacraft, do you think Mr. Binn knew?” and her voice was plaintive and concerned. “It is reserved for astronomy,” said Mr. Garrett, “to have prospective knowledge, to know the future exactly, with a calendar in one hand, and a watch in the other. I think it is not an imputation on the credibility of science to say that in other departments its knowledge of the future is speculative.”