uldn't stop to talk, so he'd dare begin.

He tried to regard his mother's frequent admonitions concerning
"manners"--that one about stirring up your potatoes as though you were
mixing mortar, and biting into one big slab of bread. He did his best,
but his cheek protruded with half a pickled peach when he heard his
father say:

"I sent Bruce on ahead to tell you that we'd be here, but he didn't mind
me. I found him out there on the prairie, looking at a rock."

All eyes turned smilingly upon the boy, and he reddened to the roots of
his hair, while the half peach in his cheek felt suddenly like a whole
one.

"It was a funny kind of rock," he mumbled in self-defence when he could
speak.

"The rock doesn't have to be very funny to make you forget what you're
told to do," his father said curtly, and added to the others: "His
mother can't keep pockets in his clothes for the rocks he packs around
in them, and they're piled all over the house. He wants her to send away
and get him a book about rocks."

"Perhaps he'll be one of these rock-sharps when he gets big," suggested
Mr. Mosher humorously. "Wouldn't it be kinda nice to have a perfesser in
the family--with long hair and goggles? I come acrost one once that
hunted bugs. He called a chinch bug a Rhyparochromus, but he saddled his
horse without a blanket and put bakin' powder in the sour-dough."

In the same way that the farmer's wife knew that boys liked gizzards,
she knew that Bruce was writhing under the attention and the ridicule.

"He'll be a cattleman like his dad," and she smiled upon him.

His father shook his head.

"No, he doesn't take hold right. Why, even when I was his age I could
tell a stray in the bunch as far as I could see it, and he don't know
the milk cow when she gets outside of the barn. I tell his mother I'm
goin' to work him over again with a trace strap----"

The sensitive boy could bear no more. He gave one regretful glance at
his heaping plate, a shamed look at Mrs. Mosher, then sprang to his feet
and faced his father.

"I won't learn cattle, and _you_ can't make me!" he cried, with blazing
eyes. "And you _won't_ work me over with a trace strap! You've licked me
all I'll stand. I'll go away! I'll _run_ away, and I won't come home
till I'm white as a darned sheep!"

"Bruce!" His father reached for his collar, but the boy was gone. His
chair tipped over, and his precious rock dropped from his shirt front
and bounced on the floor. It _w