200 fTistory of Gutta-Percha Willie.

 

One day, Willie being at work in his laboratory,
and getting himself half-stifled with a sudden fume
of chlorine, opened the door for some air just as
Hector had passed it. He stood at the door and
followed him down the walk with his eyes, watch-
ing him as he went—now disappearing behind
the blossoms of an apple-tree, now climbing one
of the little mounds, and now getting up into
the elm-tree, and looking about him on all sides,
his sickly face absolutely shining with pleasure.

“ But,” said Willie all at once to himself, “why
should Hector be the only invalid to have this plea-
sure?”

He found no answer to the question. I don’t
think he looked for one very hard though. And
again, all at once, he said to. himself—

“ What if this is what my grannie’s money was
given me for?”

That night he had a dream. The two questions
had no doubt a share in giving it him, and perhaps
also a certain essay of Lord Bacon—“ Of Building,”
namely—which he had been reading before he
went to bed.

He dreamed that, being pulled up in the middle
of the night by his wheel, he went down to go into
the garden. But the moment he was out of the
back door, he fancied there was something strange
going onin his room in the ruins—he could not tell
what, but he must go and see. When he climbed