Well over a face set with the mother's eyes was spilled that which she
had clutched and eaten of,--a thing pink and dusty, in truth, but which
was not candy.

"She does those things constantly," said the dejected father. "I don't
see what I can do to her."

I saw, however, and did it, first wiping the tooth-powder from her face.
She had called me Uncle Maje.

"She's a regular baddix," announced my namesake, gravely judicial. Then,
as if with intention to indicate delicately that the family afforded
striking contrasts, he added, "_I_ ain't a baddix--I can nearly sing."

The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon. The
woman child at last put me to thinking--to thinking that perhaps
butterflies are not meant to be happily caught. With many shouts she had
clumsily enough imprisoned one--a fairy thing of green and bronze--in a
hand so plump that it seemed to have been quilted. A moment she held it,
then set it free, perhaps for its lack of spirit. It crawled and
fluttered up the vine, trailing a crumpled wing most sadly, and I took
it for my lesson. Assuredly they were not to be caught with any
profit--at least not brutally in an eager hand. Brush them ever so
lightly and the bloom is off the wings. They are to be watched in their
pretty flitting, loved only in their freedom and from afar, with no
clumsy reachings. That was a good thing to know in any world.

The _Argus_ announced my home-coming with a fine flourish of my title in
Solon's best style. It said that I had come back to take up the practice