“Poor little cuss!” thought Phil. “I’d like to be a good father to him, but I don’t know how.” And the boy: “I’m afraid he’s disappointed in me. I’m so skinny and have pimples.” If he were only a big, good-looking fellow like Smithy, who played on the football team, his father would be proud of him. Smithy’s parents saw him almost every week in term time and took him abroad every summer. They were having his portrait painted. “What kind of time did you have with your father in town?” asked his Aunt Mary. Junior felt rather in the way at times, now that she had a husband. “Bully! Great!” and he made an attractive picture of it. “Father and I are so congenial, now that I’m old. Next summer we’re going to the woods together.” “How do you talk to your kids?” Phil asked Bill Norton by the camp fire. “I don’t talk to them. They aren’t interested in me except as a source of supply. New generation!” “I’m crazy about my boy,” said Phil, “but I have an idea that he considers the old man a well-meaning ass. Funny thing; that little fellow is the only person in the world I’m afraid of.” “No father really knows his own son,” said Billy. “Some of them think they do, but they don’t. It’s a psychological impossibility.” * * * * * Back at school again. A quick, scudding year. Summer vacation approaching already! “We’d be so pleased if you would spend the month of August with us in Maine,” wrote Blackie’s mother. She had grown fond of the boy and was sorry for him. Motherless--fatherless, too, for practical, for parental purposes. Junior, with his preternatural quickness, knew she was sorry for him and appreciated her kindness, but he was not to be pitied and his father was not to be criticized. “That’s awfully good of you,” he replied, “but Father is counting upon my going up to the North Woods with him on a long canoe trip. Some new country where no other white man has ever been.” He went to the woods, but not with his father. It was the school camp--not the wild country his father penetrated; but there was trout fishing all the same, and he loved it. Like many boys who are not proficient at athletics, he took to camp life like a savage and developed more expertness at casting and cooking and canoeing than did certain stars of the football field or track. He had natural savvy. The guides said so. Besides, he had an incentive to excel. He was not going to be a nuisance to his father on the trip they would take together some day. And though he reverted to a state of savagery in the woods, he kept his tent and his outfit scrupulously neat and won first prize in this department by a vote of the counsellors. For excellent reasons he did not shave every day in camp, but he would some day.