e of spoiling him.

Of not thinking of his future.

Of never asking him where he expected to go to if he did such things.

Of telling him tales that had no moral application.

Of saying that the handkerchief disappeared into nothingness, when it
really disappeared into a small tin cup, attached to my person by a
piece of elastic.

To this last charge I plead guilty, for in those days I had a pathetic
faith in legerdemain, and the eyebrow feat (which, however, is entirely
an affair of skill) having yielded such good results, I naturally cast
about for similar diversions when it ceased to attract. It lost its hold
on David suddenly, as I was to discover was the fate of all of them;
twenty times would he call for my latest, and exult in it, and the
twenty-first time (and ever afterward) he would stare blankly, as if
wondering what the man meant. He was like the child queen who, when the
great joke was explained to her, said coldly, "We are not amused," and,
I assure you, it is a humiliating thing to perform before an infant who
intimates, after giving you ample time to make your points, that he is
not amused. I hoped that when David was able to talk--and not merely
to stare at me for five minutes and then say "hat"--his spoken verdict,
however damning, would be less expressive than his verdict without
words, but I was disillusioned. I remember once in those later years,
when he could keep up such spirited conversations with himself that he
had little need for any of us, promising him to do something exceedingly
funny with a box and two marbles, and after he had watched for a long
time he said gravely, "Tell me when it begins to be funny."

I confess to having received a few simple lessons in conjuring, in a
dimly lighted chamber beneath a shop, from a gifted young man with a
long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a barber's pole from
my pocket, saying at the same time, "Come, come, sir, this will never
do." Whether because he knew too much, or because he wore a trick shirt,
he was the most depressing person I ever encountered; he felt none of
the artist's joy, and it was sad to see one so well calculated to give
pleasure to thousands not caring a dump about it.

The barber's pole I successfully extracted from David's mouth, but the
difficulty (not foreseen) of knowing how to dispose of a barber's pole
in the Kensington Gardens is considerable, there always being polite
children hovering near who run afte