“I want to be Thor!”
“No, I want to be Thor!”
“I was just going to be Thor, myself!”
Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the poultry-yard, still disputing the question.
When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks always act and always have acted from the beginning of time.
The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with such good intentions of giving pleasure.
“All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried Jupiter, wrathfully.
And what had they done? Well, first of all they had been afraid, running to look at the squirming heap of treasure, peeping shrilly in agitation, and running frantically away with fluttering wings and hearts.
The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire-netting had been able to endure this foolishness with an approach to the necessary god-like toleration of the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, it seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry up the progress of the race, by catching one of his pin-headed charges and holding him firmly in a benevolent small hand, directly in front of the delicious food, “where he couldn’t help seeing how good it was, seems ’s if,” explained Thor Number Three, to me.