Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him. When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven--incredible to me, and yet perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to go to bed at all! When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his pillows--the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity! Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest, “Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big chair and helpless slumber.