is a
peppermint. Open his mouth and shut his eyes, and pop! it goes."

There is, however, a pretty picture on the other side, that Jamie
thrusts his iconoclastic fists through quite as unconcernedly; and that
is the dignity of human nature. The human being can be trained into a
dignified person: that no one denies. Looking at some honored and
honorable man bearing himself loftily through every crisis, and wearing
his grandeur with an imperial grace, one may be pardoned for the
mistake, but it is none the less a mistake, of reckoning the acquirement
of an individual as the endowment of the race. Behold human nature
unclothed upon with the arts and graces of the schools, if you would
discover, not its possibilities, but its attributes. The helplessness of
infancy appeals to all that is chivalric and Christian in our hearts;
but to dignity it is pre-eminently a stranger. A charming and popular
writer--on the whole, I am not sure that it was not my own self--once
affirmed that a baby is a beast, and gave great offence thereby; yet it
seems to me that no unprejudiced person can observe an infant of tender
weeks sprawling and squirming in the bath-tub, and not confess that it
looks more like a little pink frog than anything else. And here is
Jamie, not only weeks, but months and years old, setting his young
affections on candy and dinner, and eating in general, with an appalling
intensity. It is humiliating to see how easily he is moved by an appeal
to his appetite. I blush for my race, remembering the sparkle of his
eyes over a dainty dish, and the abandonment of his devotion to it,--the
enthusiasm with which his feet spring, and his voice rings through the
house, to announce the fact, "Dinnah mo' weh-wy! dinnah mo' weh-wy!" To
the naked eye, he appears to think as much of eating as a cat or a
chicken or a dog. Reasons and rights he is slow to comprehend; but his
conscience is always open to conviction, and his will pliable to a
higher law, when a stick of candy is in the case. His bread-and-butter
is to him what science was to Newton; and he has been known to reply
abstractedly to a question put to him in the height of his enjoyment,
"Don' talk t' me now!" This is not dignity, surely. Is it total
depravity? What is it that makes his feet so swift to do mischief? He
sweeps the floor with the table-brush, comes stumbling over the carpet
almost chin-deep in a pair of muddy rubber boots, catches up the bird's
seed-cup and dart