It was New-Year's eve, and Mr. and Mrs. Idiot with their old friends were watching the old year die. The old year had been a fairly successful one for them all, and they were properly mournful over its prospective demise, but the promise of the new was sufficiently bright to mitigate their sorrow.

"What a sandwich life is, after all!" ejaculated the Idiot.

Mr. Pedagog started nervously. The remark was so idiotic that even its source seemed to make it inexcusable.

"I don't quite catch your drift," said he.

"As the man said when an avalanche of snow fell off his neighbor's roof and missed him by an inch," said the Idiot. "Why, just think a moment, Doctor, and my drift will overwhelm you. Look about you and consider what we have ourselves demonstrated to-night. If that does not prove life a series of emotional sandwiches, then I don't know what a sandwich is. Twenty minutes ago we were all gladness over the prosperity of the year gone by. Five minutes ago we were all on the verge of tears because the good old year is going the way of all years. An hour from now we will be joyously acclaiming the new. Two thick slices of joy with a thin slice of grief between."

"Ah!" said Mr. Pedagog. "I see. There is something in the analogy, after all. The bread of joy and the ham of sorrow, as you might put it; do make up the sum of human existence; but in some cases, my lad, I am afraid you will find there is only one slice of bread to two of ham."

"No doubt," replied the Idiot, "but that does not affect my proposition that life is a sandwich. If one slice of ham between two slices of bread is a ham sandwich, why is not one slice of bread between two slices of ham a bread sandwich? What is a sandwich, anyhow? The dictionary says that a sandwich is something placed between two other things; hence, all things are sandwiches, because there is nothing in the world, the world being round, that is not between two other things. Therefore, all things being sandwiches, life is a sandwich, Q. E. D."

"Is life a thing?" demanded Mr. Pedagog.

"Certainly," said the Idiot. "And a mighty good thing, too. If you don't believe it look the word thing up in the dictionary. All things are things."

"But," continued the Schoolmaster, his old spirit of antagonism rising up in his breast, "granted that life is a thing, what is it between so that it becomes a sandwich?"

"The past and the future," said the Idiot. "It is a slice of the immediate between a slice of past and one of future."

Mr. Pedagog laughed.

"You are still the same old Idiot," he said.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "Gibraltar and I and Truth are the three unchangeable things in this life, and that's why I am so happy. I'm in such good company. Gibraltar and Truth are good enough companions for anybody."

Meanwhile Mollie and Tommy, who had been allowed to sit up upon this rare occasion, stirred uneasily.

"Ith I a thandwich, popper?" said the little girl, sleepily, raising her head from her father's shoulder and gazing into his eyes.

"Yes, indeed, you are," said her father, giving her an affectionate squeeze. "A sugar sandwich, Mollie. You're really good enough to eat."

"Well, I'd rather be a pie," put in Tommy; "an apple pie."

"Very well, my son," returned the Idiot. "Have your own way. Henceforth be a pie if you prefer – an apple pie. But may I ask why you express this preference?"

"Oh, because," said Tommy, "if I'm to be an apple pie somebody's got to fill me chock-full of apple sauce."

"The son of his father," observed Mr. Whitechoker.

"I think it is a pity," Mrs. Pedagog put in at this point, "that some of the good old customs of the New Year have gone out."

"As to which, Mrs. Pedagog?" asked the Idiot.

"Well, New-Year's calling particularly," explained the lady. "It is no longer the thing for people to make New-Year's calls, and I must confess I regret it. It used to be a great pleasure to me in the old days to receive the gentlemen – my old friends, and relatives, and boarders."

"Why distinguish between your old friends and your boarders, Mrs. Pedagog?" interrupted the Idiot. "They are synonymous terms."

"They are now," said the good lady, "but – ah – they weren't always. I used sometimes to think you, for instance, didn't like me as much as you might."

"I didn't dare," explained the Idiot. "If I'd liked you as much as I might I'd have told you so, and then Mr. Pedagog would have got jealous and there'd have been a horrid affair."

The lady smiled graciously, and Mr. Pedagog threw a small paper pellet at the Idiot.

"I'm much obliged to you for holding off, Idiot," he said. "I don't know where I'd have been to-day if you'd got in ahead of me. Mrs. Pedagog has always had a soft spot in her heart for you."

"I've got the other spot," said the Idiot, "and a pair of aces are hard to beat in pairs; but I think I voice Mrs. Pedagog's sentiments in the matter, Mr. Pedagog, when I say that she and I would always have been glad to see you every other New-Year's day if I had been the fortunate winner of her hand."

"And Mr. Pedagog and I would have been glad to see you and Mrs. Pedagog in the sandwich years," said Mrs. Idiot to her husband; and then, turning to the Schoolmaster, added, "Wouldn't we, Mr. Pedagog?"

"No, madame," returned Mr. Pedagog, courteously. "You might have been, but I would not. If I had married you I could never have seen any one else with pleasure. I should have kept my eyes solely for you."

"John!" cried Mrs. Pedagog, arching her eyebrows.

"Pleasantry, my dear – mere pleasantry," returned the Schoolmaster, tapping his fingers together and smiling sweetly upon Mrs. Idiot.

"You didn't finish, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "You were telling us how you used to enjoy New-Year's calling before it went out."

"Yes," replied Mrs. Pedagog. "It was charming. I used positively to look forward to its coming with delight. We women, Mr. Idiot, found the old custom very delightful."

"But the men, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, "did you ever think of them?"

"What else did we think of? What else is there for a woman to think about?" replied Mrs. Pedagog.

"Jane!" cried Mr. Pedagog.

"Pleasantry, my dear – mere pleasantry," returned Mrs. Pedagog, frigidly. And Mr. Pedagog lit a cigar. It is not always pleasant to be quoted.

"Still," said the Idiot, "you thought of men only as creatures of the moment – "

"Entirely," said Mrs. Pedagog.

"And not as creatures of the week following," said the Idiot.

"What has that to do with it?" asked Mrs. Pedagog.

"Much – from the man's stand-point," returned the Idiot. "His digestion was butchered to make a woman's holiday. Take myself as an example. I used to make New-Year's calls; and to get through with my list by midnight, I had to start in at nine o'clock in the morning."

"Nine o'clock is not so early," said Mr. Whitechoker.

"It's early for cake and pickled oysters," said the Idiot. "And for chicken salad and wedding-cake, and for lemonade and punch, and for lobster and egg-nog, and for ice-cream and pâté-de-foie-gras."

"H'm!" said Mr. Pedagog, reflectively. "That's true."

"Quite so," observed Mr. Whitechoker, brushing off his vest, upon which the ashes of his cigar had rested. "Especially for the punch."

"There was no punch in my house," said Mrs. Pedagog. "Indeed, I always served a very simple luncheon. We did have chicken salad, of course, but the chicken was good and the salad was crisp – "

"I'd swear to it," said the Idiot.

"And we had egg-nog, but there was more egg than nog in it – "

"Again I'd swear to it," said the Idiot, smacking his lips.

"And as for the lobsters, nobody ever complained – "

"He'd have been a lobster himself who would," said the Idiot. "But that does not prove that no one ever suffered."

"And as for the pickled oysters, no one ever suffered from them that I knew of," continued the good lady. "They are harmless eaten in moderation."

"Exactly right," cried the Idiot. "No gentleman would ever complain of pickled oysters, even if they were made of inferior rubber, eaten in moderation. Yet I recall in my own experience a pickled oyster of most impressive quality. He was not a pickled oyster of the moment. He was the Admiral Dewey of pickled oysters. In appearance he resembled every other pickled oyster I ever met, but – well, he kept me in a state of worry for a month. Just eating him alone was eating pickled oysters in immoderation. I felt as if I had swallowed an overshoe. He was a charming pickled oyster, Mrs. Pedagog, and he was devoted to me, but he involved me in complications alongside of which the Philippine question is child's play. If a New-Year's caller could have confined his attentions to the ladies he met no harm would have come to him, but he couldn't, you know. The day was one continuous round of effort and indigestibles. What a man got at your house and had to eat merely to show his appreciation of your hospitality was all right and wholesome. Your lobster and egg-nog could do him no harm, but he couldn't stop with yours; he had to continue, and consume lobsters and egg-nog everywhere else and all day long. The day resolved itself into a magnificent gorge alongside of which that of Niagara seems like a wagon-rut. It finally came down to the point where either man or the custom had to die, and man being selfish, the custom went. Did you ever consider exactly how much indigestible food an amiable, well-meaning person had to consume in a round of, say, three dozen calls, Mrs. Pedagog?"

Mr. Brief nodded his approval. "Now you've struck it," he said. "I've been there, Idiot."

"I must confess," said Mrs. Pedagog, "that I never looked into that question."

"Well, I'll tell you," the Idiot resumed. "The last time I made New-Year's calls I figured it out for the doctor the next morning, and as I recall the statistics, in the course of that day I ate one hundred and twenty-nine pickled oysters, thirteen plates of chicken salad, seven plates of lobster salad, five plates of mulled sardines, twenty-three plates of ice-cream, four hundred and sixty-three macaroons, eighty-seven sandwiches ranging from lettuce and ham to chicken and potted goose-liver, enough angel-cake to feed all the angels there are and two more, sixteen Welsh rarebits that were being made just as I happened in, and crystallized ginger and salted almonds and marrons to the extent of about eighteen pounds."

"Mercy!" cried Mrs. Pedagog.

"Say, pa, where was I then?" asked Tommy, his eyes glittering with delight.

"You were eating green cheese on the moon, Tommy," said the Idiot.

"Wisht I'd been with you," said Tommy. "Must o' been better than bein' a pie."

"And all of these things," continued the Idiot, with a wink at his son, "I washed down with six gallons of lemonade, nineteen cups of coffee, eighteen cups of tea, and a taste of claret punch."

"And how about the egg-nog?" asked the Bibliomaniac, slyly.

"I judge there were about six crates of eggs in it," said the Idiot. "I never had the nerve to estimate the nog-end of it."

"What did the doctor say when you told him all that?" asked Mrs. Pedagog.

The Idiot chuckled. "What did he say?" he cried. "Why, I should think you could guess. He blamed it all on the Welsh rarebits, but he thought he could get me into shape again in time for the next New Year. I've never been the same man since."

"Well, the way I look at it," said Mrs. Pedagog, "is that it is a great pity that women must be deprived of a function that gives them pleasure because the men make pigs of themselves."

"But you don't understand, Mrs. Pedagog," the Idiot persisted. "I grant you that the man who eats all that makes a pig of himself, but he has no choice. He can't help himself. When a charming hostess insists, he'd be a greater pig if he refused to partake of her hospitality. The custom involved an inevitable sacrifice of man's digestion upon the altar of woman. That's all there was about it. If it could have been arranged so that a man could take a hamper about with him and stow all the cakes and salads and other good things away in that, and eat them later as he happened to need or want them, instead of in his own inner self, the good old custom might have been preserved, but that is impossible in these conventional days."

"You needn't have eaten it all," put in Mrs. Idiot. "You could have pretended to eat it and put it down somewhere."

"I know that, my dear. I didn't even on that occasion eat it all – I only ate what I told you. I found eight sandwiches and a pint of salted almonds in my coat-tail pocket the next morning, which I managed surreptitiously to hide away while my hostesses were getting me something else, and in one place, while nobody was watching me, I hid a half-dozen pickled oysters under a sofa, where I suppose they were found some days later when the room was put in order."

As the Idiot spoke the clock struck twelve, and the guests all rose up.

"Here's to the New Year!" said Mr. Pedagog.

"Not yet," interposed the Idiot. "That's only a signal for the Welsh rarebits to be brought in. I've sworn them off for the New Year, but I haven't for the old. The clock is a half-hour fast."

"No, my dear," said Mrs. Idiot. "It was, but I put it back. It's exactly right now."

"Then," said the Idiot, "I join you in the toast, Mr. Pedagog. Here's to the New Year: may it bring joy to everybody. Meanwhile may it bring also the Welsh rarebits."

"I thought you'd sworn off," suggested Mr. Pedagog.

"So I had," replied the Idiot, "but circumstances over which I have no control force me to postpone my reformation for another twelve months. If they had been served at half-past eleven I should have stuck to my resolve; as they have been delayed until twelve-one I cannot do less than eat them. I do not believe in wilful waste; and besides, it is quite as much the duty of the host to consume the good things he places before his guests as it is for the guests to partake. I can wait a year, I think, without wholly ruining what little digestion my former devotion to New-Year's calling has left me. Gentlemen, I propose the ladies: May their future be as golden as this rarebit; and for the men, may they always be worthy to be the toast upon which that golden future may rest with the certainty born of confidence."

And the guests fell to and ate each a golden buck to the New Year – all save Mollie and Tommy. These two important members of the household went up to their little beds, but just before going to sleep Tommy called through the door to his little sister:

"Mollie!"

"Yeth!"

"Want to play a game with me to-morrow?"

"Yeth!"

"Well, you get a cake and a pie and some gingersnaps and a lot of apples and some candy and we'll play New-Year's calls."

"Splendid!" lisped Mollie. "You'll call on me?"

"Yes," said Tommy; "and all you'll have to do will be to force food on me."

And they soon passed into the land of dreams.

XII
SOME DOMESTIC INVENTIONS

"I think I'll give up the business of broking and go into inventing," said the Idiot one Sunday morning, as he and Mrs. Idiot and their friends sat down at breakfast. "There's not much money in stocks, but the successful inventor of a patent clothes-pin makes a fortune."

"I'd think twice about that before acting," observed Mr. Brief. "There may not be much money in stocks, but you can work eight hours a day, and get good pay in a broker's office, while the inventor has to wait upon inspiration."

"True enough," said the Idiot; "but waiting on inspiration isn't a bad business in itself. You can play golf or read a rattling good novel, or go to a yacht-race while you wait."

"But where does the money come in?" asked Mr. Pedagog, his usual caution coming to the fore.

"Inspiration brings it with her," said the Idiot, "and by the barrel, too. What's the use of toiling eight hours a day for fifty weeks in a year for three thousand dollars when by waiting on inspiration in a pleasant way you make a million all of a sudden?"

"Well," said Mr. Pedagog, indulgently, "if you have the inspiration lassoed, as you might say, your argument is all right; but if you are merely going to sit down and wait for it to ring you up on the telephone, and ask you when and where you wish your barrels of gold delivered, I think it will be your creditors, and not fortune, who will be found knocking at your door. How are you going about this business, provided you do retire from Wall Street?"

"Choose my field and work it," replied the Idiot. "For the present I should choose the home. That is the field I am most interested in just now. I should study its necessities, and endeavor to meet whatever these might demand with an adequate supply. Any man who stays around home all day will find lots of room for the employment of his talents along inventive lines."

"You've tried it, have you?" asked Mr. Brief.

"Certainly I have," said the Idiot, "though I haven't invented anything yet. Why, only last week I stayed home on Monday – wash-day – and a thousand things that might be invented suggested themselves to me."

"As, for instance?" asked Mrs. Idiot, who was anxious to know of any possible thing that could mitigate the horrors of wash-day.

"Well, it wouldn't help you much, my dear," said the Idiot, "but the wash-lady would hail with unmixed delight a substitute for her mouth to hold clothes-pins in while she is hanging out the clothes. I watched Ellen in the yard for ten minutes that day, and it was pathetic. There she was, standing on her tiptoes, hanging innumerable garments on the line, her mouth full of clothes-pins, and Jimpsonberry's hired man leaning over the fence trying to shout sweet nothings in her ear. If she had had a nice little basket-hat on her head to hold the pins in she could have answered back without stopping her work every other minute to take them out of her mouth in order to retort to his honeyed sentiments."

Mrs. Idiot laughed. "Ellen finds time enough to talk and do the washing, too," she said. "I sometimes think she does more talking than washing."

"No doubt of it; she's only human, like the rest of us," said the Idiot. "But she might save time to do something else for us if she could do the washing and the talking at the same time. She may give up the washing, but she'll never give up the talking. Therefore, why not make the talking easier?"

"What you need most, I think," put in Mr. Brief, "is an instrument to keep hired men from leaning over the fence and distracting the attention of the laundress from her work. That would be a great boon."

"Not unless idleness is a great boon," retorted the Idiot. "Half the hired men I know would be utterly out of employment if they couldn't lean over a fence and talk to somebody. Leaning over a fence and talking to somebody forms seventy-five per cent. of the hired man's daily labor. He seems to think that is what he is paid for. Still, any one who objects could very easily remedy the conversational detail in so far as it goes on over the fence."

"By the use of barbed wire, I presume," suggested Mr. Pedagog.

"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all. Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from climbing over for a short cut home."

"With what result?" asked Mr. Brief.

"With the result that I had to buy a new pair of pruning-shears," said the Idiot. "My Anti-Over-the-Fence-Gabber," he continued, "would involve certain complex details, but it would work. I should have an electric battery connected with the upper cable of the fence, and an operator stationed inside of the house, close to a key which would send some six hundred or seven hundred volts through the cable whenever needed. Then if I felt that Jimpsonberry's man was interfering with my laundress, as soon as he leaned over the fence I'd have the operator send him an electric notice to quit."

"A message?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"No, a plain shock. Two hundred volts as a starter, three hundred as a reminder, and the full seven hundred if necessary to make the hint plainer."

"That would be cruel," observed Mrs. Pedagog.

"Not wholly," said the Idiot. "It would be an advantage to the man himself in one way. Hired men have too little electricity in their systems, Mrs. Pedagog. If Jimpsonberry's man, for instance, would take all the electricity I'd give him and apply it to his work, Jimpsonberry's unpulled dandelions would not be such a constant menace to my lawn. I compel Mike to weed out my lawn every spring and autumn, but Jimpsonberry doesn't attend to his at all. He doesn't sleep on it, and so doesn't bother about it. Consequently, when his dandelions go to seed the seed is blown over into my grass, and every year I get an uninvited crop, which at a dollar a thousand would make me a millionaire."

"Why don't you apply your inventive genius to the discovery of a seedless dandelion?" asked the Lawyer. "It seems to me that would be the best solution of the dandelion problem."

"Because Jimpsonberry wouldn't have 'em if I discovered 'em," said the Idiot. "I judge from the millions he raises every year that he is satisfied with dandelions as they are. He's got enough for himself, and never makes any charge for those he gives to his neighbors."

"I think a furnace-feeder would be a good thing, too," the Idiot continued, in a moment. "My furnace is a chronic sufferer from indigestion because on some days it is gorged with coal and on others with ashes. Seems to me if I could get a month's time in which to concentrate my attention upon a furnace-feeder, I could devise some kind of a contraption that would invoke the enthusiastic love of the suburban resident in Arctic latitudes the world over."

"I have often thought of that possibility myself," observed Mr. Pedagog, his eyes fondly resting upon a steaming plate of griddle-cakes that had just been brought in. "But coal is a rebellious quantity. A furnace-feeder would need to be delicately adjusted, and coal cannot be handled with delicacy. It requires a chute rather than a tube. It must be manipulated with the shovel, not the sugar-tongs."

"Correct," said the Idiot. "Therefore, you would experiment on a chute or a shovel, abandoning all idea of refining the coal. I, on the other hand, would experiment with the coal itself, Mr. Pedagog. Why not liquefy it, and let it drop automatically into the furnace through a self-acting spigot?"

"Liquefy coal?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"Certainly," replied the Idiot. "We liquefy pretty nearly everything else. If liquid air, why not liquid coal? Everything we have in nature in these days apparently can be liquefied, and while I am not familiar with the process, I see no reason why a ton of coal should not be reduced to such a shape that it can be bottled. Once bottled and provided with an automatic dropper, it could easily be adjusted so as to flow in proper quantities into the furnace at proper intervals."

"It would be very expensive. Do you know what a pint of liquid air costs?" demanded the Doctor.

"No," said the Idiot. "I neither breathe nor drink it. The plain old stuff is good enough for me, and cheap if you don't have to go to the mountains or the sea-shore to get your supply."

"Granting coal could be liquefied," the Doctor assented, "I venture to say that a ton of it would cost as much as five hundred dollars."

"I've no doubt it would," said the Idiot; "but I could afford a ton of coal at five hundred dollars if my scheme worked. A successful invention would make bread seem cheap at ten dollars a loaf. There's another thing I should put my mind on, and that is a method of cooking a cauliflower so that everybody in the house, as well as the neighbors, should not know that you are doing so," he continued. "I am particularly fond of cauliflower, but it is undeniable that in the process of cooking it becomes obtrusive, almost to the point of ostentation. I've spoken about it many times. Mike, the gardener, to whom I've spoken on the subject, thinks the cauliflower itself, if sprinkled with eau de Cologne while growing, would cease to be obnoxious in the cooking; but that is too expensive a process. It would take a dozen cases of eau de Cologne to bring a single cauliflower to maturity. My son, Tommy, has stated that he thinks it might be boiled in Florida-water instead of in the simple variety that comes from the pipes. A good suggestion for a small boy, but also expensive. Hired men and small boys do not think of the exchequer of the principal in their plans. They don't have to. Their allowance and wages are usually all velvet – an elegant vulgarism for surplus – and for my own part I have constantly to veto their little schemes for the betterment of my condition in order to have any condition at all left. But as far as the arrangement of an odorless cauliflower-cooker is concerned, it is as simple as A B C, barring one or two complications."

"I wish you'd hurry up and invent it," cried Mrs. Idiot, with enthusiasm. "What are the main features of this simple contrivance?"

"I'd have a boiler, in the first place, in which to boil the animal," said the Idiot. "When the water was ready I'd clap the creature into it, and before it had time to remonstrate I'd fasten a hermetically sealed cover over the top."

"But when you took it off the results would still be overpowering," said Mr. Pedagog.

"No, my dear sir," said the Idiot, "for the simple reason that I should affix a cold-air box and a flue to the hermetically sealed boiler. Through the cold-air box fresh air would constantly flow into the boiler. Through the flue all the aromatic drawbacks of the cauliflower would be carried off through the chimney into the upper air. Anybody who wished to know whether we were going to have cauliflower for dinner or not would have to climb up to the roof and sniff at the chimney-top to find out."

"It is simple, isn't it, Mrs. Idiot?" Mrs. Pedagog said.

"Very," replied Mrs. Idiot. "Indeed, it seems so extremely simple that I should like to know where the complications lie."

"Where all the complications in cooking lie, my dear," said the Idiot, "in the cook. The chief complication would lie in getting a cook who could, or if she could, would, use the thing intelligently."

"I don't see," said Mr. Brief, dryly – "I don't see but that what you ought to devote your time to, my dear Idiot, is the invention of an intelligent cook."

"Humph!" laughed the Idiot. "I may be an idiot, Mr. Brief, but I'm not an ass. There are some things that man may reasonably hope to accomplish – such as setting fire to the Hudson River, or growing butternuts on the summit of Mont Blanc – but as for trying to invent an intelligent cook who would stay in the country for more than two weeks for less than ten thousand dollars a year, that, sir, is beyond all the conceptions of the human mind."

"Ain't Bridget intelligent, pa?" asked Tommy.

Here was a complication, for Tommy liked to retail to Bridget the gossip of the day, and especially what "pa said."

"H'm – ah – oh yes, indeed, she is, Tommy," the Idiot replied, with some embarrassment. "Very; she's been with us three months."

"How much do you pay her, pa?" asked the boy.

"Well," said the Idiot, "not more than fifteen hundred dollars a month. Just take another griddle-cake, my son, and remember that there are some things little boys should not talk about."

"Like tumpany's bald heads?" lisped Mollie, complacently, her eye fixed upon Mr. Pedagog's shining dome.

"Precisely," observed Mr. Pedagog, appreciating the situation.

And while everybody else laughed the Idiot looked upon his children with a sternly affectionate face.

"My dear," said he to Mrs. Idiot, "I think it is time the babies got ready for Sunday-school."