quite warm--she confessed:

"He has called me that all the morning."

"It would be a wise Polydore that knows its own parents," I observed.

The slight illness of Diogenes lasted three or four days. I still
shudder to recall the memory of that hideous period. Silvia's time and
attention were devoted to the sick child. Huldah was putting in all
her leisure moments at the dentist's, where she was acquiring her
third set of teeth, and joy rode unconfined and unrestrained with our
"boarders."

Polydore proclivities made the Reign of Terror formerly known as the
French Revolution seem like an ice cream festival. I don't regard
myself as a particularly nervous man, but there's a limit! Their war
whoops and screeches got on my nerves and temper to the extent of
sending me into their midst one evening brandishing a whip and
commanding immediate silence. I got it. Not through fear of
chastisement, for fear was an emotion unknown to a Polydore, but from
astonishment at so unexpected a procedure from so unexpected a source.
Heretofore I had either ignored them or frolicked with them. Before
they had recovered from their shock, Silvia appeared on the scene.

"Diogenes," she informed them, "was not used to such unwonted quiet,
and was fretting at the unaccustomed stillness. Would the boys please
play Indian or some of their games again?"

The boys would. I backed from the room, the whip behind me, carefully
kept without Silvia's angle of vision. Before Ptolemy resumed his role
of chief, he bestowed a knowing and maddening wink upon me.

I wished that we had remained neighbor-less. I wished that the
aborigines would scalp Felix Polydore and the writer of Modern
Antiquities. Then we could land their brats on the Probate Court. I
wished that this were the reign of Herod. I vowed I would backslide
from the Presbyterian faith since it no longer included in its
articles of belief the eternal damnation of infants. How long, O
Catiline, would--

A paralyzing suspicion flashed into the maelstrom of my vituperative
maledictions. I rushed wildly upstairs to our combination bedroom,
sickroom, and nursery, where Silvia sat like a guardian angel beside
the Polydore patient.

"Silvia," I shouted excitedly, "do you suppose those diabolical
Polydore parents purposely played this trick on us? Was it a
premeditated Polydore plan to abandon their young? And can you blame
them for playing us for easy marks? Could any parents, Polydore, or
ot