mon-sense in these matters, and I shall not even look for 'anything new,' as you so crudely term it. Recollect that the water has been minutely examined possibly a dozen or more times already."
"Then why do you want to do it again?" he demanded. "I see no fun in that, if you're satisfied."
"One does not conduct delicate and protracted experiments for fun," I replied. "The valuable corroboration of what has been previously arrived at by others is in itself a worthy and sufficient end, and the possibility of detecting a fractional variation, in one of the constituents gives an added zest."
"Well," he persisted, "I suppose that the waters at Bath had been analysed often enough before, but they found radium in them, for all that."
I could not refrain from smiling at his simplicity.
"Suppose, Bobbie," I said, "assuming the frankly absurd, and supposing that our spring did contain an unknown matter in solution, how much do you think that there would be in a gallon of water? The 'something new' would not be floating about in it like a duck's egg, you know."
"Well, admitting that it would be so minute that no test could detect it, and no microscope show it even if it could be collected, it would only be a thousandth part of what you could get from a thousand gallons," replied the foolish boy. "That might be appreciable."
I have seen it stated somewhere recently that no one says, "Pish!" or "Tush!" nowadays. It is a mistake; I said both to close the conversation, and sending Bobbie down the garden I went to my own work.
I was now composing the article embodying the results of my examination. These, as I have indicated, I had never expected to be startling, but they were painstaking and sound. I showed that Perring, who last ana-
