parent's word--a confirmed and established word after his first
attempt to make a "business man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin
at the bottom and learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the
Sheridan Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family
physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground
up in a sanitarium.

"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin'
the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick.
I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about
as well as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty
alarmists. Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh
and blood? He makes me tired!"

Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite
disease was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine
conviction that lack of physical persistence in any task involving
money must be due to some subtle weakness of character itself, to
some profound shiftlessness or slyness. He understood typhoid fever,
pneumonia, and appendicitis--one had them, and either died or got over
them and went back to work--but when the word "nervous" appeared in a
diagnosis he became honestly suspicious: he had the feeling that there
was something contemptible about it, that there was a nigger in the
wood-pile somewhere.

"Look at me," he said. "Look at what I did at his age! Why, when
I was twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock
choppin' wood--yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire
in a country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a
DOCTOR because he can't--Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it