I think that the president would have urged his attendance, but that he was afraid to show how much time he could spare, so he bowed and said: "I thank you for the confidence you have reposed in me, placing your son in my charge, and I assure you that I shall do my utmost by him. Now, make yourselves perfectly at home." Old Miss turned up her nose when she entered our room. "Whew, it smells like a bear's den," she said, and Old Master's spare frame shook with laughter. "And for pity sake, what have you got in this cup?" she asked, looking at a tin can on a table. "Fish-worm oil," Bob spoke up rather proudly. "We dug the worms and roasted their oil out. Rub it on my legs so I can run fast." Master snorted and Mistress turned to me. "Dan," she asked, clearing her throat with a dry rasp, "isn't this one of your negro superstitions? Didn't you put him up to it?" "Madam," said Old Master before I could reply, "the knowledge of the efficacy of angle-worm oil comes down from the ancients and I am astonished that you should impute it to negro superstition. Leander, before trusting himself to the torrent of the Hellespont, rubbed himself with it, and if you read closely, you will find that Byron went through the same performance before tempting the same feat. Haven't you read of the angle-worm oil bearer at the Olympian games?" He slyly turned his face away to laugh, and Old Miss, like all pretentious persons, afraid of the weapon of wisdom, was willing enough to change the subject. "I am glad to see that you are learning," she said to Bob, "but I don't want you to learn things that will be of no particular use to you. By the way, General, I don't want you to school him into the notion of becoming a lawyer or a doctor." "Surely not a doctor," Master replied. "We have one doctor in the family and he is quite sufficient--unto himself. What's that in the Bible, 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'? That's it. Well it suits him any way." Old Miss sat down, gathering her skirts that they might touch nothing. "General, that's no way to talk," she said. She looked about and cried suddenly. "Why, is that a poultice there on the mantle-piece?" "Boxing glove," said Bob, and Old Master roared again. "General!" she spoke up in sharp reproof, "I do wish you wouldn't stimulate disrespect by your constant tittering and teheeing. One would think that you had sent the boy here as a monster joke. To send a child away from home is no jest, I assure you." "Madam," said Master, winking at us, lifting the tails of his long coat and seating himself on a corner of the table, "it makes me young again to come into a place like this, and being young I must be foolish. Well," he added after a pause, "do you want to stay here to-night, or shall we stop on the road?"