Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and awfully serious little man of the tribe of Buttinsky, who sat breathlessly trying to catch the pearls that fell from the ample mouth of the philosopher. Aristophanes referred to Cheropho as "Socrates' bat," a play-off on Minerva and her bird of night, the owl. There were quite a number of these "bats," and they seemed to labor under the same hallucination that catches the lady students of the Pundit Vivakenanda H. Darmapala: they think that wisdom is to be imparted by word of mouth, and that by listening hard and making notes one can become very wise. Socrates said again and again, "Character is a matter of growth and all I hope to do is to make you think for yourselves." That chilly exclusiveness which regards a man's house as his castle, his home, the one sacred spot, and all outside as the cold and cruel world, was not the ideal of Socrates. His family was his circle of friends, and these were of all classes and conditions, from the First Citizen to beggars on the street. He made no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him steadfastly over the wall. "Don't look at me that way," called Alcott with a touch of un-Socratic acerbity, "don't look at me that way--I need these things more than you!" and went on with the annexation. The idea that all good things are for use and belong to all who need them was a favorite maxim of Socrates. The furniture in his house never exceeded the exemption clause. Once we find him saying that Xantippe complained because he did not buy her a stewpan, but since there was nothing to put in it, he thought her protests ill-founded.