"Well, I'm not quite sure as to that," returned the Idiot. "I've often wondered myself whether I preferred the straight-out honest pirate, who does his work surreptitiously by night, and who doesn't pretend to be anything but a pirate, or the sleek, insinuating chap, who comes into our house by day, and runs up a bill against you which in his heart of hearts he knows is not a proper one. There are burglars and burglars in this world, Mr. Pedagog, and the one who lands in the penitentiary is not always a bigger rascal than the fellow who holds the respect of the community and sets himself up as a prominent citizen. Highwaymen may be divided into classes, some of them respectable, others not. There was Dick Turpin, who ran honest risks to obtain a living; there are men in Wall Street who work greater ruin, and are held in higher esteem. There is the footpad who takes your watch, and pawns it to buy bread for his starving family, and there is the very charming young person who sits behind a table at a church fair, and charges you seven dollars for a fifty-cent sofa-cushion. So it goes. Socially I prefer the esteemed citizen who makes me pay twenty-eight dollars for ten dollars' worth of gas; but when it comes down to a strict business basis I must say I have lost less money through the operations of the professional thief than through those of the amateur highwayman. Take a recent case in my own experience, for instance. Only last week I sent anonymously a small clock which cost me twenty dollars to a guild fair here in town, and Mrs. Idiot bought it for a birthday present for me for forty dollars. In other words, I have a twenty-dollar clock on my hands that has cost me sixty dollars."
"But you have the satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed to the good work of the guild," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"That is true enough," said the Idiot; "but the guild is only forty dollars to the good. They'd have been better off if I had given them fifty dollars in cash, and I'd have saved ten."
"But you have the clock," insisted Mr. Pedagog.
"I certainly have," replied the Idiot; "and if time is money I shall soon be rich, for that clock makes time to beat the band. If it keeps on as it has started and we stand by it, we shall soon be about a month ahead of the sun. It gains a week every forty-eight hours. If that clock were truthful, I should be a centenarian at forty."
"But you're not sorry you gave it?" said Mr. Pedagog, deprecatingly.
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "My only regret is that Mrs. I. bought it. But," he added, hastily, "she needn't know that."
"I won't say a word," said Mr. Pedagog.
"I won't, neither, pa," said Tommy, with a degree of complacency which showed that the temptation to tell was great.
"Well, I won't say mor'n two or three words about it, anyhow," put in Mollie, not anxious to commit herself to perpetual silence on the subject.