182 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 



my place. That was an inexcusable lapse. 

 But I'm not alone. We're all guilty of vast 

 ignorance about the commonest things; the 

 commoner and more familiar they are, the less 

 we know about them. It's taken us ages even 

 to observe some of the simplest phenomena, to 

 say nothing of trying to understand them. 

 For all our smartness, we're terribly ignorant." 



I guess he was dead right about that, though 

 he'd been wrong in his notion about the pep- 

 pers. I've told you that little story, not for 

 the sake of poking fun at him for his mistake, 

 but because his afterthought makes such a 

 bully statement of the sum of our own experi- 

 ence in ignorance. It's very curious 



Wait a minute, though ! While I'm telling 

 jokes on the professionals, there's another one 

 I must tell. If I don't tell it now, I'm liable 

 to forget it and leave it out altogether, which 

 would be a pity. 



There used to be a "hoss doctor" in the coun- 

 try here. He wasn't a veterinarian ; he wouldn't 

 have known what that meant. He was just a 

 "hoss doctor" whose knowledge of his work 

 had been "picked up," a little here and a little 

 there and not too much anywhere. He man- 

 aged to get along pretty well with the general 



