and
took up the previous day's issue of the Red Gap _Recorder_, meaning to
appear bored. It worked.

"Well, if Professor Oswald Pennypacker don't call his infant that, you
can bet your new trout rod he calls it something just as good. Mebbe I
better read what the proud mother says."

"It would be the kind thing before you spread evil reports," I murmured
in a tone of gentle rebuke.

So the woman polished her nose glasses and read a double sheet of
long up-and-down calligraphy--that is, she read until she exploded
in triumphant retort:

"Ha! There now! Don't I know a thing or two? Listen: 'Oswald is so
enraptured with the mite; you would never guess what he calls it--"My
little flower with bones and a voice!"' Now! Don't tell me I didn't have
Oswald's number. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied to call it a baby; he'd
be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the
truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about
that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic.

"And here--get this: She says that one hour after the thing was born the
happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold
its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely
distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his
child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could
chin itself! Quite all you would wish to know about Oswald."

I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted to know about Oswald.
I wanted to know much more. Almost any one would. The lady once more
studied the hairy face with its bone-rimmed glasses.

"Shucks!" said she. "He don't look near as proud in this as he does in
that one he sent me himself--here, where is that thing?"

From the far end of the big table she brought under the lamp a basket
of Indian weave and excavated from its trove of playing cards, tobacco
sacks, cigarette papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot
of Oswald. It was a far different scene. Here Oswald stood erect beside
the mounted skeleton of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet
left him somehow in kingly triumph.

"There now!" observed the lady. "Don't he look a heap more egregious by
that mess of bones than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk about
pride!"

And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face,
proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a propriet