Scotchman he was, never praised him; but he never
blamed him--except for cause.

The Boy has no recollection of his first tooth, but he remembers his
first toothache as distinctly as he remembers his latest; and he could
not quite understand _then_ why, when The Boy cried over that raging
molar, the father walked the floor and seemed to suffer from it even
more than did The Boy; or why, when The Boy had a sore throat, the
father always had symptoms of bronchitis or quinsy.

The father, alas! did not live long enough to find out whether The Boy
was to amount to much or not; and while The Boy is proud of the fact
that he is his father's son, he would be prouder still if he could think
that he had done something to make his father proud of _him_.

From his father The Boy received many things besides birth and
education; many things better than pocket-money or a fixed sum per
annum; but, best of all, the father taught The Boy never to cut a
string. The Boy has pulled various cords during his uneventful life, but
he has untied them all. Some of the knots have been difficult and
perplexing, and the contents of the bundles, generally, have been of
little import when they have been revealed; but he saved the strings
unbroken, and invariably he has found those strings of great help to him
in the proper fastening of the next package he has had occasion to
send away.

[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL AND PARK]

The father had that strong sense of humor which Dr. Johnson--who had no
sense of humor whatever--denied to all Scotchmen. No surgical operation
was necessary to put one of Sydney Smith's jokes into the father's head,
or to keep it there. His own jokes were as original as they were
harmless, and they were as delightful as was his quick appreciation of
the jokes of other persons.

A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring
day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that
morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and,
before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back
to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was
demanded--a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that
peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the
father's own sense of the ridiculous.

When the father returned, at dinner-time, he carried the brick,
enveloped in many series of papers, beginning with