mess on my breakfast-table every morning
would sooner or later become an unmitigated nuis ...

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... but he pays no attention to my protestations. I think the oldtime
method of walloping them every Sunday morning, on the principle that
they deserved it for something they had done during the past week, was
a good one. Shem and Japhet are not so bad, but since Ham came back
from the Ararat Academy of Higher Learning he has been about as
useless a member of the community as we have ever had. What he doesn't
know would fill six hundred volumes of the Triassic Cyclopaedia. I
caught him only the other night trying to teach his grandmother to
suck eggs, although my estimable wife was a past-mistress of that art
four hundred years before he was born. He has absolutely no respect
for age, and frequently refers to me as "the old boy," criticizes my
clothes, and remarks apropos of my patriarchal garments that
night-shirts as an article of dress for a five o'clock tea went out a
thousand years ago. Indeed, so disrespectful is he that I sometimes
wonder if he is not a foundling. I note two suspicious things in
respect to him. The first is that he is getting blacker in the face
every day, which suggests that there is in him somewhere a strain of
the AEthiopian, none of which he gets from me or his grandmother, who
was an Albino. And the second is that his father will not allow him to
be spanked, a very strange inhibition, I think, unless that operation
would disclose the boy's possession of the Missing Link. Indeed, I
should not be at all surprised to discover that the lad is either an
AEthiopian, or a direct descendant of Adam's old friend and neighbor,
Col. Darwin J. Simian, of Coacoa-on-Nut. In all of my reflections on
the subject of the training of the young, manual training has always
seemed to me the most efficacious, especially if in applying the hand
you do not restrain its force, and are not loath to use the hair-brush
or a good leathern trunk-strap as an auxiliary. And in order to
ensure their freedom from evil associations, and to keep them from
making the night hideous by their raucous yells, I have never heard of
anything better than the method of Doctor Magog Rodd, of the
Enochsville Military Academy, who kept his students in cages and
corked them up every night before they retir ...

[Illustration: The Head Nurse of the Adam Family.]

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