RELATING TO AN ODD RELATION


Now, Mr. Joseph Hooper had excellent cause for being a sour old man,
and in a measure was to be pitied because of his attitude toward the
young of his species. He had not been well-used by his own children,
although it is no more than right to explain that they were hardly
what any one save a parent would call children when they turned
against him. At that particular period in the history of the Hooper
family, the youngest of Joseph's three children was seventeen, the
oldest twenty-two--and it so happens that the crisis came just fifteen
years prior to the opening scene in this tale. It did not actually
come on Christmas Eve, but, as a matter of record, on the 2lst of
December at about half-past three in the afternoon. At that precise
instant a judge sitting on the bench in one of the courtrooms in New
York City signed the decree divorcing Mrs. Joseph Hooper from her
husband, and four minutes later the lady walked out of the building
with her son and two daughters, all of them having deliberately turned
their backs upon the miserable defendant in the case. As all of the
children were of an age to legally choose the parent with whom they
preferred to live, and as they elected to cast off the paternal for
the maternal, it readily may be seen that Mr. Hooper was not entirely
without proof that this is a cruel, heartless, ungrateful world and
filled with gall.

As a matter of fact, he had not been wholly to blame for the family
crash, notwithstanding a rather loose respect on his part for the
sanctity of the home. (It was not to be denied that he had strayed
into crooked paths and devious ways--and, to do him justice, he did