Tim tapped him sharply on the knee. The man shuffled, then looked over the top of his illustrated paper with an air of shocked surprise. "Eh, Tim," he asked. "Where we all come from, did you say?" "Everything, not only us," was the clean reply. "That's it," Judy supported him. "Now, then," Maria added quietly, as if she had done all the work. Uncle Felix laid down his entertaining pictures of public men in misfit-clothing furiously hitting tiny balls over as much uncultivated land as possible--and sighed. Their violent attitudes had given him a delightful sensation of repose. They were the men who governed England, and this savage hitting was proof of their surplus energy. He resigned himself, but with an air. "Well," he said vaguely, "I suppose--it all just--began somehow--of itself." And he stole a sideways glance at a picture of a stage Beauty attired like a female Guy Fawkes. "It was created in six days, of course, us last," said Tim, regarding him with patient dignity. "We remember all that. But where it came _from_ is what we thought _you'd_ know." He closed the illustrated paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard the grass and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a decorative pattern. "From?" repeated Uncle Felix, as though the word were unfamiliar. "Your body and mind," the boy resumed, ignoring the pretence that laziness offered in place of information, "and all that kind of thing; trees and mountains, and birds and caterpillars and people like Aunt Emily, and clergymen and volcanoes and elephants--oh, everything in the world everywhere?" There was another sigh. And another pause dropped down upon creation, while they watched a looper caterpillar that clung to the edge of the illustrated paper and made futile circles in the air with the knob it called its head. Some one had forgotten to let down the ladder it expected, or perhaps it, too, was asking unanswerable questions of the sun. "I believe," announced Judy, still smarting under a sense of recent neglect, "it just came from nowhere. It's all in a great huge circle. And we go round and round and rounder," she went on, as no one met her challenge, "till we're finished!" She avoided her brother's eye, but glanced winningly at Uncle Felix, remembering that she had gained support from him before by a similar device. At Maria she looked down. "You know nothing anyhow," her expression said, "so you _must_ agree." "I don't finish," said Maria quietly, whereupon Tim, feeling that the original question was being shelved, made preparation to obliterate her--when Uncle Felix intervened with a longer observation of his own. "It's not such a bad idea," he said, glancing sideways at Maria with approval, "that circle business. Everything certainly goes _round_. The earth is round, and the sun is round, and, as Maria says, a circle never finishes." He paused, reflecting deeply. "But who made the circle," demanded Tim.