The Idiot had been laid up for a week. That is to say, he was too indisposed to attend to business at his office, and the family physician thought it would be a good idea if his patient would be content to remain quietly indoors for a little while. To this the Idiot cheerfully consented.

"If there is one thing that I can do to perfection," he said, "it is resting. Some men are born leisurely, some achieve leisure, and some are discharged by their employers. I belong to the first two classes. I can never become one of the third class, because, being my own employer, I am naturally pleased with myself, and am not likely to dispense with my own services."

And so he stayed at home, and for a week pottered about the house, as he put it, and he had a glorious time.

"What are you going to do with yourself this morning, dear?" asked Mrs. Idiot on the morning of the first day. "I've got to go to market, and there are one or two other little things to be attended to which will keep me out for some hours. Do you think you can amuse yourself while I am out?"

"Well, I don't know," said the Idiot. "I can try. Of course, you know, my dear, that I am a good deal of a baby yet. However, if you can trust me to stay all by my lonesome for two or three hours I'll try to behave. I promise not to take the piano apart, and I vow I won't steal any jam, and I sha'n't float hair-brushes in the bath-tub pretending that they are armored cruisers looking for Spaniards, and I'll try to be good, but I can't make any promises."

Mrs. Idiot smiled, as an indulgent guardian should, and went forth. The Idiot stayed at home and enjoyed himself. What he did is perhaps best indicated by his remarks some time later at a Sunday-night tea at which Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog, and Mr. Brief, the lawyer, were present.

"Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, "did you ever have an attic?"

"A what?" demanded the Schoolmaster, naturally somewhat nonplussed.

"An attic," said the Idiot. "A favored spot wherein to potter, to root, to rummage."

"Why, yes," said Mrs. Pedagog, after a moment of deliberation. "I have had an attic, but it never seemed to me to be a particularly interesting spot. I've used it as a sort of store-room for things I didn't know what to do with."

"Useless things," suggested Mr. Pedagog.

"Entirely so," acquiesced the good lady.

"Then if they are useless, why keep them?" queried the Idiot. "Useless things might better be thrown away than stored away even in an attic."

"Oh, as for that," rejoined Mrs. Pedagog, "they were useless in the sense that there was nothing I could do with them, and yet there was generally some quality of association or something about them that so appealed to me that I couldn't quite throw them away, or even bring myself to give them away."

"That is the idea," said the Idiot. "One's cherished possessions are often stored away up-stairs and forgotten, and then sometimes years after you'll go rummaging about the house for lack of some other employment; an old trunk, a wooden box, will be unearthed in the attic, and then what a flood of memories will come rushing back over you as the long-forgotten objects come to light, one by one."

"I have had much the same experience," said Mr. Brief, "in what I might term my professional attic. We keep a room for the storage of old papers, and strange exhibits in litigation turn up there frequently that bring back old-time lawsuits in a most interesting fashion."

"I suppose, then," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a shrug of tolerant contempt, "that the attic is, in your estimation, a sort of repository for family archives."

"That's about it," said the Idiot. "You ought to see mine. There are archives from the Ark in mine. I've got all the portraits of my unpopular relatives up there, and such a gallery of smug-looking individuals you never saw. There's Uncle Jedediah, who hated me because I set off a giant cracker under his chair one Fourth of July, and who from that day vowed I was born to be hanged; and who sent me a crayon portrait of himself the following Christmas—"

"That seems to me to show a kindly feeling, not one of hatred, towards you," suggested Mrs. Pedagog.

"Oh no," said the Idiot, with a laugh. "You never knew my dear old Uncle Jed. He sent it in a pure spirit of revenge. He had to send something, and he picked out the one thing he had reason to know I didn't want; and he was likewise aware that my mother had a sense of the proprieties and would hang that portrait upon the wall of my bedroom, whence it could stare at me, disapprovingly, forevermore. Still, when I became the head of my own house, I did not take a mean-spirited revenge on Uncle Jedediah's portrait by selling it to one of the comic papers with a joke under it; I gave it the nicest, warmest, most comfortable spot I could find for it under a pile of old magazines in the attic, and the other day when it came to light again I greeted it with an affectionate smile; and the picture of the old gentleman rising hurriedly from over the giant cracker on that long-forgotten Fourth, brought vividly to mind by the portrait, brought tears to my eyes, I laughed so heartily. It really was very affecting."

Mr. Pedagog gazed at the Idiot fondly.

"You are a great boy," he said. "You'd never suspect it, but I had a similar case of Uncle Jed, but the years I have lived since have softened my feelings so that I remember my old relative with a certain degree of affection."

"I shall never believe, my dear John," said Mrs. Pedagog, "that in your day boys ever placed giant crackers under their uncles' chairs."

"We never did, my love," Mr. Pedagog responded, quickly.

"Why, of course not," laughed the Idiot. "They couldn't, you know. They hadn't been invented. What was your trouble with Uncle Jed, Mr. Pedagog?"

"Oh, our difference of opinion was rather of an ethical import," replied Mr. Pedagog, genially. "My Uncle Jed was a preacher, and he used to speak entirely from notes which he would make out the night before and place in the pocket of his black coat. All I did was to take the notes of his next day's sermon out of his pocket one Saturday evening, and put in their stead a—ah—a recipe for what we called Washington pie—and a very good pie it was."

"John!" ejaculated Mrs. Pedagog.

"I did, my dear," confessed the Schoolmaster, "and really I have never regretted it, although my particular uncle gave me a distressingly acrid and dreary lecture on my certain future when he found out what had happened. Yet what did happen, though mischievously intended, resulted in great good, for when the dear old gentleman stood up in the pulpit and started to preach the next morning, with the recipe for a Washington pie as the only available note at hand, he pulled himself together and preached off-hand the finest sermon of his life, and he discovered then the secret of his after-success. He became known ultimately as one of the most brilliant preachers of his time, and from that moment never went into the pulpit with any factitious aids to his memory."

"You mean cribs, don't you?" asked the Idiot.

"That is what college-boys call them, I believe," said Mr. Pedagog. "I will say further that a year before he died my Uncle Jed told me that it was my mischievous act that had given him the hint which became the keynote of his eloquence," he added, complacently. "I shall always remember him affectionately."

"Of course," said the Idiot. "No doubt we all remember our Uncle Jeds affectionately. I certainly do. He was my mother's brother, and he meant well. I never really blamed him for not knowing how to sympathize with a boyish prank, because there has never been a school of instructions for uncles. Unclehood is about the hardest hood man has to wear, and as I have observed uncles and their habits, they either spoil or repel the small chaps and chappesses who happen to be made their nephews and nieces by an accident of birth. Uncles are either intensely genial or intensely irritable, and as far as I am concerned it is my belief that our colleges should include in their curriculum a chair of 'Uncleism.' Unclehood is a relationship that man has to accept. It is thrust upon him. He can't help himself. To be a father or a mother is a matter of volition. But even in a free country like our own, if a man has a brother or a sister he is liable to find himself an uncle at any time whether he wishes to be one or not. Then when it happens he's got to reason out a course of procedure without any basis in previous experience."

"Why don't you write a book on 'Hints to Uncles,' or 'The Complete Aunt,'" suggested Mr. Brief. "I have no doubt it would make good reading."

"Thanks for the idea," said the Idiot. "I think I'll do it. Not in the hope of profit, but for the benefit of the race."

"What has all this to do with attics?" asked Mrs. Idiot.

"The natural resting-place of the bad uncle," explained the Idiot. "Still, I maintain that it is every man's duty to keep an attic for the useless things, as Mrs. Pedagog calls them, which some day, when he least expects it, will carry his mind back to other days. The word itself, attic, carries the mind back to the splendors of Athens and other things that are out of date. When I was ill I found sincerest pleasure in rummaging. You can't rummage in a library if your library is properly looked after. You can't rummage in a bedroom in a well-kept house. You all know what parlors are—designed largely for the reception of people who come out to call upon you in their best Sunday clothes, and who would never think of calling upon you intimately, as a friend might, in his knickerbockers. You can't rummage there. The only place where one may rummage with any degree of success is in the attic, and my experience has been such that I believe my recent illness has contributed to my health. My mind has been carried back to conditions that used to be. Conditions which existed then and which were inferior to conditions which now prevail make me satisfied with the present. Where old-time conditions were better than the existing one I have naturally discovered how to improve. Rummaging, therefore, is improving to the mind and contributes to one's contentment."

"Then there are good economical reasons for the maintenance of an attic," the Idiot continued. "I found enough old boyhood collections of various things there to keep Tommy and Mollie happy for years without my having to pay out a penny for birthday presents—old stamps, old coins, old picture papers, and, I assure you, a lot of old newspapers, too, with better and more readable news in them than is now to be found in any of our modern bilious journals. Then the bundles of letters that came out of that place—my mother's letters to me, written while I was away at school; my father's letters in the old days at your house, Mrs. Pedagog, which did much to keep me straight then and re-reading of which doesn't hurt now; and, best of all," he added, with an affectionate glance at Mrs. Idiot, "a little bundle of my own letters to a certain person tied up with a blue ribbon, and full of pressed roses and autumn leaves and promises—"

"In the attic?" asked Mr. Brief, with a dry smile. "Is that where Mrs. Idiot keeps your promises?"

Mrs. Idiot blushed. "I have a cedar chest full of treasures up there," she said. "I thought it was locked."

"Well, anyhow, I found them," said the Idiot, cheerfully; "and while they were not especially good reading, they were good reminders of other days. It wouldn't be a bad idea if every married man were to read over the letters of his days of courtship once a year. I think it would bring back more forcibly than anything else the conditions of the contract which he was inviting the young partner of his joys to sign. If an attic never held anything but bundles of one's old love-letters it would demonstrate its right to become an institution."

"Very true," said the lawyer; "but," he added, prompted by that cautious spirit which goes always with the professional giver of advice, "suppose that side by side with that little bundle of pressed flowers and autumn leaves and promises one should chance to find another little bundle of pressed flowers and autumn leaves and promises—the promises written by some other hand than the hand that is rummaging in the cedar chest? What then? Would that prove a pleasing find?"

"Oh, as for that," the Idiot remarked, "when I advocate the maintenance of an attic as one of the first duties of mankind, I mean its intelligent maintenance. The thing which makes of the British Museum, the National Attic of Great Britain, a positive educational force is its intelligent direction. It is the storehouse of the useless possessions of the British Empire which have an inspiring quality. There is nothing in it which makes a Briton think less of himself or which in any way unpleasantly disturbs his equanimity. So with the attic of the humble citizen. It must be intelligently directed if it is to become an institution, and should not be made the repository of useless things which ought to be destroyed, among which I class that other possible bundle to which you refer."

And inasmuch as the whole party agreed to the validity of this proposition, the subject was dropped, and the Idiot and his guests wandered on to other things.