d you one for your own self now."

"'At one's good enough for me."

"Maw! You make Sam lea' my youse alone."

Mrs. Nuddle moaned: "Sammie, don't bother Little Brother now. You go
on about your own business."

Smash! splash! Sam had kicked the house into ruins with the side of
his foot.

Mamise was so angry that before she knew it she had darted at him and
smacked him with violence. Instantly she was ashamed of herself. Sam
began to rub his face and yowl:

"Maw, she gimme a swipe in the snoot! She hurt me, so she did."

Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it
was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She
had accepted too much of Mamise's money to be very indignant, but she
did rise to a wail:

"Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern."

"I'm sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just
couldn't help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his
brother's house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he'll be just
as much of a nuisance as Jake and he'll call it syndicalism or
internationalism or something, just as Jake does."

Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white
story.

When Abbie gasped, "What on earth's the matter?" he growled: "I bumped
into a girder. Whatya s'pose?"

Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction, but she
knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the
home champion.

She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the
steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was
earning--or at least receiving--the family was eating high.

Little Sister told her brother Sam, "It's a shame to waste good meat
on his old black lamp." And Sam's regret was, "I wisht I'd 'a' gave it
to um."

Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but
it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public
welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to
expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have
time to be kind to them in particular.

Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every
time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made
her mad.

To-night when he found her at the house her first gush of anxiety for
him was followed by a remark of singular heartlessness:

"But, oh, did you hear of the