ite it on its
promptly protesting little flank. And there's unclouded glory in
occasionally togging him out in spotless white, and beholding him as
immaculate as a cherub, if only for one brief half-hour. It's the
transiency of that spotlessness, I suppose, which crowns it with
glory. If he was forever in that condition, we'd be as indifferent to
it as we are to immortelles and wax flowers. If he was always cherubic
and perfect, I suppose, we'd never appreciate that perfection or know
the joy of triumphing over the mother earth that has an affinity for
the finest of us.

But I _do_ miss a real nursery, in more ways than one. The absence of
one gives Dinkie the range of the whole shack, and when on the range
he's a timber-wolf for trouble, and can annoy his father even more
than he can me by his depredations. Last night after supper I heard an
icy voice speaking from the end of the dining-room where Dinky-Dunk
has installed his desk.

"Will you kindly come and see what your son has done?" my husband
demanded, with a sort of in-this-way-madness-lies tone.

I stepped in through the kitchen door, ignoring the quite unconscious
humor of "_my_ son" under the circumstances, and found that Dinkie had
provided a novel flavor for his dad by emptying the bottle of ink into
his brand-new tin of pipe-tobacco. There was nothing to be done, of
course, except to wash as much of the ink as I could off Dinkie's
face. Nor did I reveal to his father that three days before I had
carefully compiled a list of his son and heir's misdeeds, for one
round of the clock. They were, I find, as follows:

Overturning a newly opened tin of raspberries, putting bread-dough in
his ears; breaking my nail-buffer, which, however, I haven't used for
a month and more; paring the bark, with the bread-knife, off the
lonely little scrub poplar near the kitchen door, our one and only
shade; breaking a drinking-glass, which was accident; cutting holes
with the scissors in Ikkie's new service-apron; removing the covers
from two of his father's engineering books; severing the wire joint in
my sewing-machine belt (expeditiously and secretly mended by Whinnie,
however, when he came in with the milk-pails); emptying what was left
of my bottle of vanilla into the bread mixer; and last but not least,
trying to swallow and nearly choking on my silver thimble, in which he
seems to find never-ending disappointment because it will not remain
fixed on the point of his no