“At me, his own loving mother. I just woke him up and danced him and cuddled him and asked him when he was going to bring joy into my life and prattle sweet baby words into my ear. Then, without any warning, he said--he said, ‘Damn!’ And when I dropped him into his cradle and began to cry, he said it again!” “Such a thing was never heard of in the whole history of infancy,” declared my father. “I see how it is; he’s picked it up from nurse. Nurse must go!” “He might have heard you,” said my mother, reproachfully. “You _do_ say it oftener than you think. But what will the career of a baby be who begins swearing before he can even walk straight? It’s horrible--it’s ruined my life!” “I should be the last to swear before a child,” said my papa. And then they went wrangling off. Not a jump to the ceiling did I get, not a smile, not a word of affection. Perhaps ingratitude in a parent is as painful a spectacle as a family furnishes. I kept my mouth shut for two months after that fiasco, but it made them mad to hear of the good things I said to nurse when they were not present. I will affirm of nurse that she is a capital listener, and lets me use what language I like, and never questions either my statements or conclusions. But there, when all is said, a really capable nurse is a luxury, whereas parents appear to be a grim necessity, as far as I have yet been able to understand. “STAR O’ BOSTON” He was a very elderly merman, and he had lived in one cave under the Caribbean Sea for seventy submarine years. “It’s hard,” he said, “cruel hard at my time of life to be turned out after all the rent I’ve paid. If I’d only gone to a Building Society I should have bought the blessed place ten times over by this time.” He wept a senile tear, which added one drop to the waters of the Caribbean; then he drew his black seaweed covering round him, put out a phosphorescent lamp, and went to sleep. The morrow would see him and his merdaughter turned away for ever from the home of their fathers. And all about a paltry matter of two years’ rent. “San Francisco” slept peacefully despite the pending eviction. His coverlet of living seaweed rose and fell regularly; once he turned and smiled sadly and uttered the name of his dead merwife. “Alas! my fair ‘Moonflower,’” he said; “it is well-nigh over with us now, for ‘Lord Aberdeen’ refuses me tenancy of the old cavern any longer, owing to my natural and increasing disinclination to pay rent. For how can I pay what I myself lack? His only alternative offer is that he have our little ‘Star o’ Boston’ to wife; and she with a mergirl’s unwisdom loves elsewhere, her affections being wholly fixed on the penniless but personable merboy ‘Theodore H. Jackson.’”