d he was underbred and ign'rant and ill-mannered and
illiterate and a lot of stuff like that, and I most b'lieve we'll have a
new principal next year!"

"Say! She'd ought to gone to school to him for a while! He's the worst
principal to chew about manners I ever saw."

"Gee! Do you s'pose vacation'll ever get here?" sighed Sube.

"It don't ack like it," replied Gizzard dubiously. "Last week was about
six months long, and there was one day of vacation at that."

"Seems to me as if time was goin' backwards," complained Sube.

But it was not. It was going forward at its regular speed. The
difficulty was that the boys' minds were outstripping it. In due time
vacation arrived, and a long happy summer stretched itself out before
them.

Mr. Cane believed in vacations. He also believed in teaching boys to be
industrious. He still harbored the old-fashioned idea that every boy
should be required to do some useful work every day of his life, Sundays
excepted. And while Sube and his brothers with their more up-to-date
point of view could see the fallacy of his position, they were unable to
reform him with any amount of argument.

As Sube seated himself at the breakfast table one morning and glanced
over his working orders for the day, a scowl came over his usually sunny
countenance.

"What's the good of callin' it a vacation if a feller has to labor all
the time?" he muttered.

Mr. Cane glanced at Sube over the top of his newspaper as he replied:
"Now we are not going to open up that old discussion again. The way you
boys take on over an hour's work around the place makes me sick! Why,
when I was your age, Sube, I was glad to work from daylight until dark
for just my board; and it wasn't any such board as you boys get,
either."

"Yes, I'll bet you were glad," growled Sube.

"Certainly I was glad," his father assured him. "In those days boys
expected to work. They weren't brought up with the idea of lolling at
ease that you boys seem to have."

"Did you work every day?" asked Cathead.

"Every day."

"Every single day?"

"Certainly."

"Didn't you ever take a day off?"

"Oh, occasionally I'd take a day off to go fishing or do a little
studying--"

"I don't s'pose they had circuses in those days," interjected Sube.

"Oh, perhaps once during the summer my father would take me to see a
good dog and animal show," explained Mr. Cane as he folded his napkin
and left the table.

"They didn't use to go in swimmin'