is older companions occasioned him much unhappiness; in
fact, many of the intense sorrows of his childhood were caused by the
thoughtless mockery of his sister Leah Clara, aged nineteen months.

To the uninitiated spectator it would appear when gazing casually at
young Rupert Plinge that the psychologically educational environment
surrounding him was deeply impregnated with the spirit of political
reformation which, though neither Elizabethan in tone nor strictly
Cromwellian in atmosphere, was strongly suggestive to the lay mind of
the Second Empire. The subconscious force of this abstract influence
went far toward moulding the delicate shoots of his rapidly developing
mentality into a brilliant knowledge of weights and measures, decimals,
and the native population of Borneo.

Whether Rupert was enjoying his rubber comforter on the cool green
grass, or on the slightly painful gravel, or on the fiercely hot
asphalt, summer was to him a season of unsurpassed sensuality, flooding
his character with rich productive thought and a passionate adoration
for his great-aunt Maud, who was wont to beguile the long sun-stained
hours by lying amid cushions among the foliage, humming "The
Star-Spangled Banner," while she removed with the point of her
nail-scissors caramels and other adhesive morsels from the gutta-percha
plate of her new false teeth which lay in her lap.

With an amazing clarity of perception which, though generally supposed
to be inherited from his great-uncle Miles, for fifty-four years
Unitarian minister in the Red Lamp district of Honolulu, would
undoubtedly in the searching light of twentieth century vision be mainly
attributed to prenatal influences and astronomical premonitions, he
realised that the atmosphere was exceedingly chilly in the winter.

Later biographists have exposed with somewhat malicious emphasis the one
weak point in an otherwise magnificently constructed intelligence--to
wit, the peculiar inability to recognise the inner psychology and
spiritual determination of his great-grandfather--Bobbie Plinge--who as
all the world knows met a tragic death at the hands of Great Brown
Spratt, the last but _one_ of the Mohicans, some fifteen years before
the birth of Rupert himself. This deficiency in one of the greatest of
all American characters was in a measure remedied by his excessive
appreciation of his grandfather O'Callaghan Soddle's luxurious house in
Boob Street, later on when the abode of stup