To the outside world, the Forest family was a model of domestic felicity, and not without cause as family life goes; but Mrs. Forest was very far from a happy woman. This was due partly to her delicate health, which gave her a disposition to “borrow trouble,” and to look too much beyond the grave for the happiness a stronger and more philosophical nature would have created out of her really fortunate environment. At times, she still suffered from the loss of the baby Arthur, though he had been dead some eight years. The doctor could hardly understand this as a normal expression, and she often accused him of a lack of sympathy. He himself submitted calmly always to the inevitable, learned the lesson that any misfortune afforded, applied it practically to his daily life, and in no other way remembered a suffering that was in the past. His wife, he said, had a passion for the “luxury of woe,” and this was a diseased condition. Dan gave her a world of trouble. She had made an idol of him from his birth, and it was indeed hard to feel that her deep love for him was not sufficient to cure him of a single one of his bad habits. Years of the most loving effort to make him take off his hat on entering the house, had been unavailing; and he still tramped through her tidy house with dirty shoes every day of his life, and though nearly fourteen years of age, it is questionable whether he had abandoned the charming habit of coming down stairs astride the baluster. He teased the twins, worried Clara whenever an opportunity offered, went and came without asking permission of his mother, and at table he was distressingly awkward. On this particular morning the doctor said to him, a little after sitting down to the breakfast-table and while he was serving the hominy— “Now Dan, my boy, I’ve been cheated out of my morning sleep by the hubbub in the house, and my nerves are irritated; so you’ll save them a shock and much oblige me if you will give me warning when you are going to upset your glass, or wipe your knife off the table with your sleeve.” Dan had more affection for his father than for any other being in the world. He hung his head, but answered good-naturedly, “I’m not going to do either this morning, sir.” During this reply he was vigorously mixing a piece of very hard butter in the hominy which his father had just put into his plate, and the result was the landing of his plate, bottom upwards, on the floor by the way of his legs. Mrs. Forest uttered an exclamation of despair; but Clara quietly rose, removed the _debris_, and brought Dan another plate. This time, Dan was really distressed, and his mortification was increased by the doctor’s laughing.