n any occasion of his
life, either laughed aloud or wept.

He was a "disappointment" to his father. At least that was the parent's
word--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make
a "business man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin at the bottom and
learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic
Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs
to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.

"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin' the
matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick. I put
him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well
as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists.
Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood? He
makes me tired!"

Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease
was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that lack
of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some
subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or
slyness. He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis--one
had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work--but
when the word "nervous" appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly
suspicious: he had the feeling that there was something contemptible
about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.

"Look at me," he said. "Look at what I did at his age! Why, when I was
twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock choppin'
wood--yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire in a
country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a DOCTOR
because he can't--Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it like a man
he wouldn't be sick."

He paced the bedroom--the usual setting for such parental
discussions--in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and
gesticulating to his bedded spouse. "My Lord!" he said. "If a little,
teeny bit o' work like this is too much for him, why, he ain't fit for
anything! It's nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it--well, I
won't say it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to know just how much of
it's put on!"

"Bibbs didn't want the doctor," said Mrs. Sheridan. "It was when he was
here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat anything.
Honey, you better come to bed."

"E