"My father answers very few _I_ ask _him_," interposed a fragile little white-faced fellow who had strolled up in time to catch the drift of the confidential talk. He did not appear strong enough even to put a question: he nursed a ragged ball, had lost a front tooth, and gave off the general skim-milk look which some children carry about with them. Webster, without inquiring further, began to feel a new respect for himself as not being worse off than other boys as to fathers; also a new respect for his father as not being worse than his class: fathers were deficient! Remembering this discovery at school--one of the big pleasant ideas he picked up outside lessons--he did not on the morning in question press his father more closely as to using horns when you have them and not using money when you have it. In fact, he was already beginning to shield his father and had quite ceased to interrogate him in company, lest he expose some ignorance. He therefore credited this incident where it belonged: as a part of his growing knowledge that he couldn't look to his father for any great help on things that puzzled him--fathers, as had been said, being deficient, though always contriving to look so proficient that from merely surveying them you would never suspect the truth. Webster's father was a minor bookkeeper in one of the city's minor banks. Like his bankbooks, he was always perfectly balanced, perfectly behaved; and he was also perfectly bald. Even his baldness might have been credited to him as one of the triumphs of exact calculation: the baldness of one side being exactly equal to the baldness of the other: hardly a hair on either exposure stood out as an unaccounted-for remainder. Webster thought of his father as having worked at nothing but arithmetic for nearly forty years. Sometimes it became a kind of disgust to him to remember this: as was his custom when displeased at anything he grew contemptuous. In one of his contemptuous moments he one day asked: "How many times have you made the figure 2?" "Three quadrillion times, my son," replied his father with perfect accuracy and a spirit of hourly freshness. His father went on: "The same number of times for all of them. When you're in the thousands, you may think one or the other figure is ahead, but when you get well on into the millions, there isn't any difference: they are neck and neck." This subject of arithmetic was the sorest that father and son could have broached: perhaps that was the reason why neither could get away from it. The family lived on arithmetic or off it--had married on it, were born unto it, were fed by it, housed and heated by it, ventilated and cooled by it. Webster's father's knowledge of arithmetic had marched at the head of the family as they made their way through time and trouble like music. It had been a lifelong bugle-blast of correct numerals.