ming smile, but she happened to be absorbed at the
moment in the end of a novel, the beginning of which she was going to
read later, so that it was not until I coughed that she raised her eyes
from her book. For a moment she stared at me as though she were
doubtful whether I was not one of the characters in whose vicissitudes
she had been engrossed, then, letting the volume fall to the ground,
she exclaimed in a voice of rapture, "Children, look at your father!"

Roused from their respective volumes by the ardor of this exhortation,
my two sons and two daughters bent their critical eyes upon the male
author of their being. It was a moment of sweet triumph for the old
man for which he had made the most careful preparations. It was in
vain that their gimlet-like faculties sought to discover flaws in the
eminently fashionable costume of white striped serge, the brand-new
yellow shoes, the jaunty summer necktie, and the appropriate hat,
whereby I was transformed from a plain man to a respectable-looking
member of society. The father who can run the gauntlet of his
children's censorship may look the cold world in the face without a
quaver. Philosophy has taught me this, and it was under the spur of
the philosophic spirit that I had sought out the most expensive and
most fashionable tailor in town, and told him to build me a summer
outfit such as no one could carp at. Expense? He was to spare none.
Cut? The latest and most joyous.

The children clapped their hands and there was a lively chorus of
approval, and I had the satisfaction of hearing Josie, whose hair is
ornamently auburn, and whose face reminds me of her mother at the same
age, declare that I looked "perfectly scrumptious," a sentiment which,
in spite of its flavor of school-girl slang, seemed to express the
critical estimate of the family circle.

"I look like a perfect idiot," I remarked, with becoming modesty, as I
surveyed myself in the glass. I did not think so, all the same.
Indeed, I was saying to myself that I had had no idea I could look so
well. Yet, after all, it is other people who decide whether one looks
like an idiot or not.

"On the contrary," said Josephine, having surveyed me once more from
head to foot to make sure that I was in nowise peculiar, but just like
everybody else (only nicer, as she would say), "you look neat, and cool
as a cucumber, and five years younger. Doesn't he, dears?"

"I should think so," said little Fred, who