When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window, casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest a moral life. Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going. I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living in life’s essential,--excitement,--and neither the future nor the past mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal. In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby, yellow-haired little boy of six. Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at the thought of his escape from my ogredom.