bloodshed, horror, and all manner of painful circumstance.
Reading the tales aloud, he edited as he went along; but he was
subject to that curious weakness that afflicts some people:
reading aloud made him helplessly sleepy: after a page or so he
would fall into a doze, from which he would be awakened by the
crash of a lamp or some other furniture. The children, seized
with that furious hilarity that usually begins just about
bedtime, would race madly about the house until some breakage or
a burst of tears woke him from his trance. He would thrash them
all and put them to bed howling. When they were asleep he would
be touched with tender compassion, and steal in to tuck them up,
admiring the innocence of each unconscious muzzle on its pillow.
Sometimes, in a crisis of his problems, he thought of writing to
Dr. Holt for advice; but the will-power was lacking.

It is really astonishing how children can exhaust one, he used to
think. Sometimes, after a long day, he was even too weary to
correct their grammar. "You lay down!" Groups would admonish
Yelpers, who was capering in his crib while Bunks was being
lashed in with the largest size of safety pins. And Gissing,
doggedly passing from one to another, was really too fatigued to
reprove the verb, picked up from Mrs. Spaniel.

Fairy tales proving a disappointment, he had great hopes of
encouraging them in drawing. He bought innumerable coloured
crayons and stacks of scribbling paper. After supper they would
all sit down around the dining-room table and he drew pictures
for them. Tongues depending with concentrated excitement, the
children would try to copy these pictures and colour them. In
spite of having three complete sets of crayons, a full roster of