tale--then
she was better satisfied with it than ever.

_From Susy's Biography._

Papa's favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes
to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems
to rest his head. He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has
the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant
understand. Our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had
been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm
altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the
habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. At length
he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he
decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down
and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would
even if the alarm had been in order. Papa went despairingly
upstairs and said to mamma, "Livy the mahogany-room won't go on. I
have just opened the window to see."

"Why, Youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of
coarse the alarm will ring!"

"That's what I've opened it for, why I just went down to see if it
would ring!"

Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see
whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he
_mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't
understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make
him believe an impossible thing true.

This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on
me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums
and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days.
Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling
presently warms into anger. I cannot get far in the reading of the
commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part,"
and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third
part,"--before my temper is all gone. Ashcroft comes up here every day
and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit
which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the
rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. It is
pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and
says, after one of his efforts, "Now you _do_ understand