No sane dentist will administer an anesthetic to a woman, without a
witness: not that women as a class are dangerous, but because some women
can not be trusted to distinguish between their dreams and the facts.
Every practising lawyer of insight also knows that a wronged woman's
reasons are plentiful as blackberries, and must always be taken with
large pinches of the Syracuse product.

Mad Jack followed his regiment here and there, dodging his creditors, and
finally in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one induced his wife to borrow a
hundred pounds for him, with which he started to Paris intent on
retrieving fortune with pasteboard.

He died on the way, and the money was used to bury him. The lame boy was
then three years old, but a few dark memories, no doubt retouched by
hearsay, were retained by him of Mad Jack, who in his most sober moments
never guessed that he would be known to the ages as the father of the
greatest poet of his time.

Mad Jack was neither literary nor psychic.

The widowed mother remained at Aberdeen with her boy, living on the
hundred and fifty pounds a year that had been settled on her in a way that
she could not squander the principal--all the rest had gone.

The child was shy, sensitive, proud and headstrong.

The mother used to reprove him by throwing things at him, and by chasing
him with the tongs. At other times she diverted herself by imitating his
limp. And yet again she would smother him with caresses, beseech his