o do with this kid, anyhow?" demanded my father
at this point. "Turn him into a strap-hanger, or is this just a little
lynching party?"

"Hush, Enoch," protested Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an
unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little
Methy into a receptive mood. He is having his supper."

"Supper?" roared my father. "You call that stuff supper? Why, the
child is getting thinner than a circus lemonade--"

"In the grosser sense, yes," replied Aunt Jerusha, calmly, after the
manner of maiden ladies who are sure of their position. "But look at
those eyes. Do they not betoken a great and budding soul within that
is hourly waxing in strength and beauty?"

"My dear Jerusha," said my father, unhooking me from the wall and
handing me a ripe red banana to eat, "all that you say is very lovely,
and I have no doubt that under your administration of affairs the boy
will sooner or later become a bully idea, but I hate a man whose
convexity of soul has been attained through a concavity of stomach.
What this boy needs at this stage of the game is development in what
you properly term the grosser sense, I might even go so far as to say
the butcher sense as well as the grocer sense. Ham and eggs is what he
needs."

And with that he sent out and had a diplodocus carnegii killed, and
fed me himself for the next ten days on dainty morsels cut from the
fatted calf of that luscious bird. It was thus that I escaped the fate
of the over-good who die young and became a factor in the world of
affairs rather than a pleasant memory in the minds of my family.

As for my education it was limited, and I may say desultory. In this
my Aunt Jerusha was allowed a greater authority than in the matter of
my diet, and she early made up her mind that the great weakness of the
educational system of the day was the tendency of the teachers in our
schools to cram the minds of the young.

"There is no hurry in days like these when people live to be eight or
nine hundred years old," she observed to my mother. "There is not very
much to be learned as yet. Science is in its infancy, very little
history has been made, and as for Latin and Greek, it is entirely
unnecessary for Methy to study those languages, because as yet,
nobody speaks them, and with the possible exception of that tramp
poet, Homer, who passed through here last week on his way West, nobody
is using it in literature. Teach him the three Rs and all will be
well.