tleman are inseparably associated
with a series of chastisements which, even as he had prophesied when
administering them, I have not been able to forget, although I cannot
see that any of them ever resulted in a lasting reformation of my
ways. On the contrary the desire to see what new form of thrashing his
disciplinary mind could invent led me into devising new kinds of
provocation, so that for a great many years his visits to our house
were a source of great anxiety to my parents. His view of me and my
ways were expressed with some degree of force to our family physician
who, when at the age of a hundred and fifty-three I came down with the
mumps, having summoned the whole family and said that I would burst
before morning, was met by a reassuring observation from Adam that he
wouldn't believe I was dead even if I had been buried a year.

"It is the good who die young, Doctor," he said. "On that principle
this young malefactor will live to be the oldest man in the world."

A curious example of his gift of prophecy!

Adam's table manners were a frequent source of mortification to us
all. The free and easy habits of the Garden period clung to him
throughout his life, and under no circumstances could he be induced to
use either a fork, a knife or a spoon, and even on the most formal
occasions he absolutely refused to dress for dinner.

"Fingers were made before forks," he said, "and as for spoons I have
no use for such frills. I can eat my peas out of the pod, and as for
soup it tastes better out of a dipper anyhow."

As for the knives, his dislike of them was merely in their use at
table. He was fond of knives of all sorts, and he regarded them always
as his legitimate spoil whenever he dined anywhere, pocketing every
one he could lay his hands on with as much facility as the Egyptian,
and Abyssinian drummers who visited our section of the country every
year made off with the spoons of our hostelries. Nor could we ever
appeal to him on the score of etiquette. Any observation as to the
ways of our first families was always met by a cold but quick response
that if there was any firster family than his own in all creation, he
couldn't find its name in the social register. Indeed the old
gentleman was rather inclined to be very snobbish on this point, and
when any of his descendants chose to take him to task for the
crudeness of his manners he was accustomed to look them coldly over
and retort that things had come to a