you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple of
months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send him to
college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business."

He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her
weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the
supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie
devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.

"What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb."

"He doesn't like fat, Robert," my mother explained.

"I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy."

"Well, Robert, he isn't your boy," Cousin Jenny would remind him.... His
bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use of
brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail
fellow well met with every Tom, Dick and Harry that commuted,--although
the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman
too. But he had his standards, and held to them....

Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing to accept the
scheme of things as presented to me entire. In my tenderer years, when I
had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet (there were more
than ten), and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed, my mother would
come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her hand; a book of
selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his
approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions'
den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that