en and placate her with the
gift of trinkets, for there is enough Redskin in her to make her
inordinately proud of anything with a bit of flash and glitter to it.
But she is about as responsive to actual kindness as a diamond-back
rattler would be, and some day, if she drives me too far, I'm going
off at half-cock and blow that breed into mince-meat.

By the way, I can see myself writ small in little Dinkie, my moods and
waywardnesses and wicked impulses, and sudden chinooks of tenderness
alternating with a perverse sort of shrinking away from love itself,
even when I'm hungering for it. I can also catch signs of his pater's
masterfulness cropping out in him. Small as he is, he disturbs me by
that combative stare of his. It's almost a silent challenge I see in
his eyes as he coolly studies me, after a proclamation that he will be
spanked if he repeats a given misdeed.

I'm beginning to understand the meaning of that very old phrase about
one's chickens coming home to roost. I can even detect sudden impulses
of cruelty in little Dinkie, when, young and tender as he appears to
the casual eye, a quick and wilful passion to hurt something takes
possession of him. Yesterday I watched him catch up his one-eyed Teddy
Bear, which he loves, and beat its head against the shack-floor.
Sometimes, too, he'll take possession of a plate and fling it to the
floor with all his force, even though he knows such an act is surely
followed by punishment. It's the same with Poppsy and Pee-Wee, with
whom he is apt to be over-rough, though his offenses in that direction
may still be touched with just a coloring of childish jealousy, long
and arduously as I struggle to implant some trace of fraternal feeling
in his anarchistic little breast. There are even times, after he's
been hugging my knees or perhaps stroking my cheek with his little
velvet hands and murmuring "Maaa-maa!" in his small and bird-like coo,
when he will suddenly turn savage and try to bite my patella or pull
my ear out by the root.

Most of this cruelty, I think, is born of a sheer excess of animal
spirits. But not all of it. Some of it is based on downright
wilfulness. I have seen him do without things he really wanted, rather
than unbend and say the necessary "Ta-ta" which stands for both
"please" and "thanks" in his still limited vocabulary. The little Hun
will also fall on his picture-books, at times, and do his best to tear
the linen pages apart, flailing them about in