lapse of years I won't be sure about the bricklaying, but at any
rate, work was slack in his regular line, and so he went to the
proprietor of this vast retail establishment and procured a
responsible position on the strength of his easy and graceful
personal address and his employment of some of the most stylish
adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he was nearly seven
years old--yes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word of
the schoolbook for it. We should have had a second chapter on
this boy. Probably at nine he was being considered for president
of Yale--no, Harvard. He would know too much to be president of
Yale.

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who
having stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up
and let the animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it
in his possession. But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good
of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had
absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's else fox,
which is undoubtedly the way a compiler of school readers would
phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes the morality of
the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, he showed
poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he
not have swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion
shown by the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy,
a messy and difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture
in the tunic he could have emerged by the front way with ease and
dispatch. And what is the final upshot of it all? The boy falls
dead, with a large unsightly gap in the middle of him. Probably,