says he likes he really does not
like, and to please him therefore, it becomes necessary to give him
what he professes to dislike. Ergo, I will read him to sleep with the
seventeenth chapter, part forty-nine of the works of Niet-Zhe on the
co-ordination of our aesthetic powers in respect to the relative
delights of pleasure and pain._

I will do my Aunt Jerusha the credit of saying at this point that her
method of putting me to sleep was efficacious. I do not ever remember
having retained consciousness past the third paragraph of her remedy
for insomnia.

[Illustration: Aunt Jerusha as a disciplinarian.]

I tremble to think of what I should have become had this fauntleroy
process of rearing been allowed to continue unchecked. There were
prigs enough in our family already without afflicting the world with
another, and it rejoices me to this day to recall that just as we were
reaching the point when it was either an early and beautiful demise in
the odor of sanctity as a perfect child, or my present eminence as the
most continuous human performance on record for me, my father stepped
in, reasserted his authority and rescued me from the clutches of my
Aunt Jerusha. Returning one day from business, he discovered Aunt
Jerusha sitting in a rocking-chair in the nursery before me reading
aloud from her tablets, whilst I, as usual, hung strapped and
suspended from a hook on the picture moulding. It was my supper-time,
and she was feeding me according to the New Thought method of
catering. The substance of her discourse was that hunger was an idea,
nothing more. She was proving to her own satisfaction at least that I
was hungry only because I thought I was hungry, and as father came in
she was trying to persuade me that if I would be a good boy and make
up my mind that my appetite had been appeased by a series of courses
of thought biscuits, spirituelle waffles, and mental hors d'oeuvres
generally I would no longer be hungry.

"Fill your spirit stomach with the food of thought, Methy, dear," she
was saying as my father appeared in the door-way. "Make up your mind
that it is stuffed with the crackers and milk of the spirit; that
your spiritual bread is buttered with the oleomargerine of lofty
ideals, and sugared with the saccharin of your granulated meditations,
and you will grow strong. You will become an intellectual athlete,
like the great King Ptush of Egypt; a winner in the spiritual
Marathon--"

"What are you trying t