cott had received
the gift with veneration, and then quite promptly had summoned Catie to
do reverence at the selfsame shrine. But Catie had rebelled.

"Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful
thing like that, that you can't use?"

CHAPTER THREE

At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been
what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler." The game accomplished itself
by means of a chair by way of pulpit, and a serried phalanx of other
chairs by way of congregation, whom the young preacher harangued by the
hour together. The harangues were punctuated by occasional bursts of
song, not always of a churchly nature, and emphasized by gestures which
were more forceful than devout. In this game Mrs. Brenton often joined
him, lending her thin soprano voice to help out his quavering childish
notes, and doing her conscientious best, the while, to keep the songs
attuned to the key of proper piety. To be sure, she did insist upon
bringing her sewing into church and, on one occasion, she patched her
young son's trousers into a hideous pucker, by reason of her greater
interest in the method of his expoundings.

"Just for all the world like father!" she was wont to say. "But
wherever did he pick it up, when father was in his grave, three years
before the child was born?"

The question was left unanswered by herself of whom she asked it. All
too soon, moreover, it was joined by another question of similar
import, but far more appalling. Indeed, where did the boy, where does
any boy, pick up the tricks and manners and the phraseology of certain
of his forbears who quitted the world before he fairly entered it? In
Scott's case, the example was a flagrant one.

At the starting of the game of "Grandpa Wheeler," Mrs. Brenton had been
so charmed with the outworkings of heredity as to balk at nothing Scott
might do: sermon, hymn, or even prayer. When she was sure of her role
and had the leisure, she joined him in his imitative worship,
delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of
convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day,
Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar
phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a
long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott lifted up his
head.

"Mo--ther," he shrilled vaingloriously; "I forgetted how it ought to
go; but didn't I put up a bully bl