Alice says that I am not practical enough to make a successful carpenter; she gets this unfair opinion of me from an incident in our early wedded life which she delights in recalling in the presence of people upon whom I am particularly desirous of making a favorable impression. It seems that when Galileo and Herschel were little tots I undertook to construct a playhouse for them in the back yard. This was at a time when I was exceptionally busied with my professional studies; Mars was rapidly approaching perihelion, and I had been commissioned by the Blue Island Society of the Arts and Sciences to prepare a chart of the bottle-neck seas. It would have been surprising indeed had I not been preoccupied--too absorbed in intellectual pursuits to cope successfully with any such worldly and prosaic thing as a playhouse in the back yard. Yet Alice insists that it is most amusing that I should have neglected to provide that structure with windows and a door, and that, as a natural consequence, I should have nailed myself up securely in that affair. On another occasion I painted myself gradually into a corner while attempting to paint the floor of the spare chamber. Alice reproached me bitterly for this; she said she supposed everybody knew that a floor should always be painted toward, and not away from the door. Alice seems never to consider that few other people are gifted with such intuitions as she has, but are compelled to drag along through life learning by experience. I do not wish to be understood as complaining or railing against fate because I am not skilled in mechanics; I recognize as a distinct boon the fact that I am awkward in the use of tools, and the further fact that I have no ambition in the direction of mechanical endeavor has doubtless saved me many a bruised thumb and a vast amount of hard labor. When I see my neighbors tinkering away at their storm windows and garbage boxes and grape vine trellises and dog kennels and window screens and front gates, I do not neglect to thank heaven that Alice has the best of reasons for not asking me to engage in similar odd jobs about our house. Still, I am sure that, if I ever do engage in any avocation, it will be that of nailing lath, an employment requiring an exercise of patience, of intelligence, and of skill to the highest degree. Until we bought the new place I had no idea that the expense of conducting an establishment of one's own was so large. It seems, however, that when one has once become a property-owner there is no end to the things one must have and cannot get along without. It is impossible to say how or where the venders of patent arrangements find out about you, but no sooner do you buy a place of your own than you are run to death by people who actually prove to you that you _must_ have what they have to sell.