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Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum of PLUSES and MINUSES, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be approached.
And it is just as well to go slow. The smallest error of angle at the centre means a tremendous going astray at the circumference. I ahem do not feel that my summer has been wasted, by any means. You follow me? It is worth some delay to be doubly sure that I put down no plus signs as minuses." "Yes, of course. How beautiful that is out there, isn't it?"
Five minuses later I had dressed, and was running up the hill to the pilot station with my fishing tackle, together with some sandwiches, some bottles of beer, and a tin pannikin, slung in a corn sack over my shoulder not a very elegant turn-out, but the correct thing for such rough and tumble work as schnapper fishing. At the top of the hill I stopped to give myself breath a minute.
Seventy years of toiling and moiling and effort and sweat, and it has all come to nothing; like a long algebraic sum that covers pages of intricate calculations, and the pluses and minuses just balance each other; and the net result is a great round nought. So let us remember the twofold process, and let it stir us to make sure that 'in our embers' shall be 'something that doth live, and that not 'Nature, but something better God 'remembers what was so fugitive. It is not fugitive if it is a part of the mighty whole.
In the same way a number of lives and works of art disappear before our very eyes owing to the complete absence of criticism. It may be objected that critics would have nothing to do because all modern works are poor and insignificant. But this is a narrow way of looking at things. Life must be studied not from the pluses alone, but from the minuses too.
Saunders is our only bowler, and Mike's been brought up on Saunders. You'd better win the toss if you want a chance of getting a knock and lifting your average out of the minuses." "I have won the toss," said the other with dignity. "Do you think I don't know the elementary duties of a captain?" The school went out to field with mixed feelings.
Here Mrs. Noah interrupted him with: "That's it, the very it; you want nothing better than to have that girl sit close to you when she recites, as she does; and once when she was workin' out some of them plusses and minuses, and things, her slate rested on your knee; it did, I saw it with my own eyes; and then, let me ask, when Jessie is drummin' on the piano, why don't you bend over her, and turn the leaves, and count the time, as you do when Maddy plays; and how does it happen that lately Jessie is one too many, when you hear Maddy's lessons.
'That's true; but one man will be more sensitive, more cowardly, if you will, than another; and then I think no one should stand who does not believe himself to have a fair chance. His doing so might probably mar his future prospects. How can I put myself in competition with such men as Uppinall and Minuses?
"Two minuses make one plus," says his Riv'rence, as ready as you plase, "and that'll account for the increased daycrement I mane to take the liberty of producing in the same mixed quantity," says he, follying his Holiness's epistolical example. "By all that's good," says the Pope, "that's the best stuff I ever tasted; you call it a mix'd quantity, but I say it's prime."
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