An honest old gentleman living on the North Side has two young sons, who, like too many sons of honest gentlemen, are given much to boyish worldliness, such as playing "hookey" and manufacturing yarns to keep themselves from under the maternal slipper. The other day the two boys started out, ostensibly for school, but as they did not come home to dinner and were not seen by their little sister about the school-grounds, the awful suspicion entered the good mother's mind that they had again been truant. Along about dark one of them, the younger, came in blue with cold. "Why, Pinny," said the mother, "where have you been?" "Oh, down by the lake, getting warm," said the youngster. "Down by the lake?" "Yes; we were cold, and we saw the smoke coming up from the lake, so we went down there to get warm. And," he continued, in a propitiatory tone, "we thought we'd catch some fish for supper." "Fish?" exclaimed the mother. "Yes; Melvin's comin' with the fish." At this juncture the elder boy walked in triumphantly holding up a dried herring tied to the end of a yard or so of twine. That night, when the honest old gentleman reached home, the young men got a warming without having to go to the steaming lake. But all of Field's keen analytical comprehension of child-nature is purified and exalted in his writings by his unalloyed reverence for motherhood. The child is the theme, but it is almost always for the mother he sings. Even here, however, he could not always resist the temptation to relieve sentiment with a piece of humor, as in the following clever congratulations to a friend on the birth of a son: _A handsome and lively, though wee body Is the son of my friend, Mrs. Peabody-- It affords me great joy That her son is a boy, And not an absurd little she-body._