“Suppose we don’t discuss it any longer, Mamma,” Lucy interrupted shortly. “Oh, very well. If I had known you couldn’t bear to have the slightest hint of criticism of him I’d have kept still.” Lucy said no more. XII The friendship between John and Jim was of the sort that has its roots deep in the past. They had been playmates and chums since early childhood. Jim was two years the elder and one of his first memories was of wishing he had a mother like John’s. His own mother had died when he was an infant and Mrs. Winter gave the lonely child many a happy hour mothering him along with her own child. Jim’s father, a dry minded man who owned a hardware store, was mystified by the boy’s quaint fancies. “Are the flowers lonesome at night?” the child asked Mr. Sprague one day. And once when it was raining he said, “The sky is crying and the trees are sorry,” as the latter bent in the wind. His father always laughed at such speeches and advised him not to be a fool. At first Jim would slip from the room and weep, but later he learned to conceal his hurt feelings as his father whipped him if he found him crying. So the child gradually acquired the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself. Though Jim’s faith in things mystical had in early childhood been the most eager and ardent, he was the first of the two boys to become a sceptic. Mr. Sprague in his hardware store had a business which seemed to be an appropriate emblem of his nature, and he had never attempted to meet his imaginative son half way; but it was Jim’s own habit of inquiry regarding the world around him, rather than the fault of his unsympathetic parent, which brought about a change in his childish outlook. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus any more, John,” he confessed the first Christmas after his faith had forsaken him. “Well _I_ do!” John answered indignantly. “He’s going to bring me a new sled too. You’re jealous because he’s not going to bring you one.” And John ran away out of earshot of heresy. Jim went home and threw himself face downward on the bed in the bare room where he and his father slept. While he lay there he admitted to himself that he was jealous of John but that did not alter his painfully won conviction. Jim loved companionship with animals. A tailless cat, a lame gosling, chickens, and anything else that needed care, shared his affection. If one of these outcasts became ill he ministered to it as though it were a baby. One Sunday he sat for three hours holding a dying puppy in his lap.