"What I ask myself sometimes," said Solomon, looking straight in
front of him, "is what do we do it for?"

"What do we do what for?"

"Work like blessed slaves, depriving ourselves of all enjoyments.
What's the sense of it? What--"

A voice from the perambulator beside him broke the thread of
Solomon Appleyard's discourse. The sole surviving son of Hezekiah
Grindley, seeking distraction and finding none, had crept back
unperceived. A perambulator! A thing his experience told him out
of which excitement in some form or another could generally be
obtained. You worried it and took your chance. Either it howled,
in which case you had to run for your life, followed--and,
unfortunately, overtaken nine times out of ten--by a whirlwind of
vengeance; or it gurgled: in which case the heavens smiled and
halos descended on your head. In either event you escaped the
deadly ennui that is the result of continuous virtue. Master
Grindley, his star having pointed out to him a peacock's feather
lying on the ground, had, with one eye upon his unobservant parent,
removed the complicated coverings sheltering Miss Helvetia
Appleyard from the world, and anticipating by a quarter of a
century the prime enjoyment of British youth, had set to work to
tickle that lady on the nose. Miss Helvetia Appleyard awakened,
did precisely what the tickled British maiden of to-day may be
relied upon to do under corresponding circumstances: she first of
all took swift and comprehensive survey of the male thing behind
the feather. Had he been displeasing in her eyes, she would, one
may rely upon it, have anteceded the behaviour in similar case of