On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him, and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard. When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain, hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls. But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town on a journey--the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield. Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction; but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the gates.