quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind them?"
Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? God has not left Himself without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour. Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phœnician, was one of their forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and almost unaccountable similarities."
She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"
"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer to the needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to compass a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"
He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the—the late earth." He held out to her what looked something like a needle threaded with coarse white linen thread. "Will your Majesty deign to look at this?"
She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought back a torn towel, and began mending it. "Why, it sews very well," she said; "who taught you that?"
"The mother of inventions generally," he answered. "If you ever had gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you haven't answered my question."
"About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the raison d'être of a people before you can tell the answer. What is the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that has no catechism as a guide-post?"
"A very different end from the old one," answered Adam, half sternly. "Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a happier and a healthier world, if it was no more."
"Adam," she said abruptly, "if we had children, in what religious faith would you bring them up?"