it, Baby?"



CHAPTER II. The Pest

Thackeray, as a lad, was dropped from college for laziness and
for gambling. Bismarck failed to get a University degree, because
he lacked power to study and because he preferred midnight beer
to midnight oil. George Washington, in student days, could never
grasp the simplest rules of spelling. The young Lincoln loved to
sprawl in the shade with fish-pole or tattered book, when he
should have been working.

Now, these men were giants--physically as well as mentally. Being
giants, they were by nature slow of development.

The kitten, at six months of age, is graceful and compact and of
perfect poise. The lion-cub, at the same age, is a gawky and
foolish and ill-knit mass of legs and fur; deficient in sense and
in symmetry. Yet at six years, the lion and the cat are not to be
compared for power or beauty or majesty or brain, or along any
other lines.

The foregoing is not an essay on the slow development of the
Great. It is merely a condensation of the Mistress's earnest
arguments against the selling or giving away of a certain
hopelessly awkward and senseless and altogether undesirable
collie pup named Bruce.