make tempers a trifle short. I spoke
rather sharply to Dinky-Dunk yesterday regarding the folly of leaving
firearms about the house where children can reach them. And he was
equally snappy as he flung his ugly old Colt in its ugly old holster
up over the top corner of our book-cabinet. So, to get even with him,
when Dinkie came in with some sort of wide-petaled field-flower and
asked if I didn't want my fortune told, I announced I rather fancied
it was pretty well told already.... Scotty, by the way, now follows
Dinkie to school and waits outside and comes loping home with him
again. And my two bairns have a new and highly poetic occupation. It
is that of patiently garnering youthful potato-bugs and squashing the
accumulated harvest between two bricks.

_Sunday the Twelth_

I have been examining Gershom with a more interested eye. And when he
changed color, under that inspection, I apologized for making him
blush. And as that only added to his embarrassment, I artlessly asked
him what a blush really was. That, of course, was throwing the rabbit
straight back into the brier-patch, as far as Gershom was concerned.
For he promptly and meticulously informed me that a blush was a
miniature epilepsy, a vasomotor impulse leading to the dilation or
constriction of the facial blood-vessels, some psychologists even
claiming the blush to be a vestigial survival of the prehistoric
flight-effort of the heart, coming from the era of marriage by
capture, when to be openly admired meant imminent danger.

"That isn't a bit pretty," I told Gershom. "It's as horrid as what my
husband said about handshaking originating in man's desire to be dead
sure his gentleman friend didn't have a knife up his sleeve, for use
before the greeting was over. It would have been so much nicer,
Gershom, if you could have told me that the first blush was born on
the same day as the first kiss."

"Kissing," that youth solemnly informed me, "was quite unknown to
primitive man. It evolved, in fact, out of the entirely
self-protective practice of smelling, to determine the health of a
prospective mate, though this in turn evolved into the ceremonial
habit of the rubbing together of noses, which is still the form of
affectionate salutation largely prevalent among the natives of the
South Sea Islands."

"What a perfectly horrible origin for such a heavenly pastime," I just
as solemnly announced to Gershom, who studied me with a stern and
guarded eye