Then I sat down by father and watched the three boys together, while Richard was preventing his guest from pounding a toad with a stone because it preferred to hop away instead of being made into a dirt pie, and I saw the truth of what he said. The seven-year-old child who went to riding school, dancing school, and a military drill, did not know how to express his emotions in play, and frozen snowballs and other cruelty was his distorted idea of amusement. Poor rich boy, sad little only son, he was not allowed the freedom to respond to the voice of nature even as the tenement children that dance in the streets to the hand-organs or stir the mud in the gutter with their bare toes. It is not the tenement children of New York who are to be pitied; it is those that are being fitted to keep the places, in the unstable and frail crafts of the Whirlpool, that their parents are either striving to seize or struggling to reserve for them. At the end of half an hour the boys came back to the porch, all three delightfully and completely dirty, and clamouring that they were hungry. The English tyrant not appearing, I took them into the house and, after a washing of hands and faces, gave the boys the usual eleven o'clock lunch of milk and simple cookies to take out in the sun to eat. As they were thus engaged the tyrant appeared on the horizon, horror written in every feature, and a volley of correction evidently taking shape on her lips, while an ugly look of cowed defiance spread itself over the child's face as he caught sight of her. There was no scene, however. Father said in the most offhand way, as if being obeyed was a matter of course, "Go back and tell your mistress that I am carrying out her request, and that after luncheon I will send the boy safely home, with a written message." "But his medicines, his hour's rest alone in the dark, his special food,--the medical man in New York said--" protested the woman, completely taken aback. "You heard my message?" said father, cheerfully, and that was all. "What are you going to advise?" I asked, as in the middle of the afternoon father came from his office, where he had given the lad a thorough inspection. "Simply to turn him loose in light woollen clothes, give him companions of his age, and let him alone." "Can't you word it differently?" I asked. "Why, is not that fairly direct?" he replied, looking surprised; "and surely the direct method is almost always the best." "I think this is the one case where it is not, dear old Daddy. In fact, if you are destined, as I see that you are, to pick up and tie the threads of ravelled health in the Bluff Colony, you will have to become more complicated, at least in speech, accustomed as they are to a series of specialists, and having importance attached to the very key in which a sneeze is pitched.