a rugged-looking boy, and it is only I, knowing him as I do,
who can fathom the sensibilities housed in that husky young body.
There is a misty broodiness in his eyes which leaves them
indescribably lovely to me as I watch him in his moments of raptness.
But that look doesn't last long, for Dinkie can be rough in play and
at times rough in speech, and deep under the crust of character I
imagine I see traces of his Scottish father in him. I watch with an
eagle eye for any outcroppings of that Caledonian-granite strain in
his make-up. I inspect him as Chinkie used to inspect his fruit-trees
for San Jose scale, for if there is any promise of hardness or cruelty
there I want it killed in the bud.

But I don't worry as I used to, on that score. He may be rough-built,
but moods cluster thick about him, like butterflies on a shelf of
broken rock. And he is both pliable and responsive. I can shake him,
when in the humor, by the mere telling of a story. I can control his
color, I can excite him and exalt him, and bring him to the verge of
tears, if I care to, by the mere tone of my voice as I read him one of
his favorite tales out of one of Peter's books. But I shrink, in a
way, from toying with those feelings. It seems brutal, cruel,
merciless. For he is, after all, a delicate instrument, to be treated
with delicacy. The soul of him must be kept packed away, like a
violin, in its case of reserve well-padded with discretion. Two
things I see in him: tenseness and beauty. And these are things which
are lost, with rough handling. He shrinks away from brutality. Always,
when he came to the picture of Samson pulling down the pillars of the
temple, in Whinstane Sandy's big old illustrated Bible, he used to
cover with one small hand a certain child on the temple steps as
though to protect to the last that innocent one from the falling
columns and cornices.

But I'm worried, at times, about Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward the boy.
There are ways in which he demands too much from the child. His father
is often unnecessarily rough in his play with him, seeming to take a
morose delight in goading him to the breaking point and then lamenting
his lack of grit, edging him on to the point of exasperation and then
heaping scorn on him for his weakness. More than once I've seen his
father actually hurt him, although the child was too proud to admit
it. Dinky-Dunk, I think, really wants his boy to be a bigger figure in
the world than his dad. Mil