orn on his
fifty-ninth birthday, but even as to that he would not speak. I shall
never forget the look on his face when I asked him at a Thanksgiving
dinner one year if he had ever been a monkey with a tail. He rose up
from the table with considerable dignity, and leading me out into the
wood-shed turned me over on his knee and subjected me to a rather
severe course of treatment with a hair-brush.

"There, my lad," he observed when he had done. "If I had had a tail
that is about where I should have worn it."

I never referred to the subject again.

CHAPTER III

SOME REMINISCENCES OF ADAM

The concluding paragraphs of my last chapter have set my mind running
upon the subject of my original forebears, and inasmuch as I have
decided to write these memoirs of mine along the lines of least
resistance, it becomes proper that I should at this time, put down
whatever happens to be in my mind. To speak frankly I never really
could get up much of a liking for old grandfather Adam. He was as
devoid of real humor as the Scottentots, and simply because by a mere
accident of birth he became the First Gentleman of Europe, Asia and
Africa, he assumed airs that rendered him distinctly unpopular with
his descendants. He considered himself the fount of all knowledge
because in the early days of his occupancy of the Garden of Eden there
was no one to dispute his conclusions, and the fact that he had been
born without a boyhood, as we have already seen at the age of
fifty-nine, left him entirely unsympathetic in matters where boys were
concerned. I shall never forget a conspicuous case in point
demonstrating his utter lack of comprehension of a boy's way of
looking at things. He was on a visit to our home at Enochsville, and
on the night of his arrival, having called for a glass of fermented
grape-juice, thinking to indulge in a mere pleasantry, I brought him a
tumblerful of sweetened red ink, the which he gulped down so avidly
that it was not until it was beyond recall that he realized what I had
done; and when in his wrath he called for an instant remedy and I
brought him the blotting paper, instead of smiling at the merry
quality of my jest, he pursued me for two hours around my father's
farm, and finally cornering me in the Discosaurus shed, larruped me
for twenty full minutes with a paddle pulled from a prickly cactus
plant in my mother's drawing-room, thorn side down. Indeed most of my
early recollections of the old gen