slip through my clumsy fingers and rattle over the uncarpetted floor with what sounded to me like the detonations of artillery, Mrs. White never told me to wake up and be more careful of what I was doing. Instead she would coo like a philandering pigeon and murmur: “Why, laddie--what would the hungry little birds say if they were to see _all_ that nice food wasted!” When panic-stricken at the number of my crumpled failures I feloniously thrust them into my pocket, she would fish them out with sweet amaze, exclaiming: “Why, dearie--how did _these_ get here? Does any little girl or boy know how _all_ these poor little strips of paper got into the very bottom of Charlie’s dark pocket?” When, as once in so often happened, I would “all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,” she never told me to stop at once and behave myself; she would open her eyes to their incredulous roundest, slightly drop her lower jaw, wonderingly scan every face and then purr: “Why, manny--what’s become of _all_ the smiles?” There was invariably a reply to these inquiries and it was almost as invariably furnished by one Adelaide Winkle, a dreadful child, but one more sinned against, I now appreciate, than sinning. Forced to the limit in the hothouse of the home, and deeply imbedded in the fertilizing approval of Mrs. White, she was in all our gay little parterre the most brilliant and the most noxious bloom. At the age of seven she already had the executive air of a woman who has long presided over meetings. She also played the piano, danced fancy dances, sang, recited, wore three rings, a necklace and a red plush dress. I hated her, even more if possible than I hated Mrs. White, for she not only kept an eye on my shortcomings, she formulated them into ready words and by request smugly proclaimed them. But it was the manner in which Mrs. White exploited her before strangers that most enraged me. When visitors appeared, as they often did, for a kindergarten under cultivation was a decided novelty, Adelaide was called upon to execute her entire program from A to Izzard. She sang, she elocuted “Bobolink, spink, spank, bobolink,” she played her show piece (“Fairy Chimes”) on the-piano, she withdrew to an adjoining room and tripped coquettishly in again, strewing, like the springtime, an armful of tissue-paper roses, and last of all she gave with experiments a short discourse on geography that brought tears to the eyes of the most criminal. The experiments were evolved in sight of the audience with the aid of a large wooden trayful of sand and a tin dipperful of water. Under Adelaide’s precocious fingers these helpless elements gave a presumably correct rendering of the Book of Genesis in action, becoming at her will a continent, a river, a lake, an island, a peninsula, a mountain. One downward thrust of an unerring thumb upon a soggy peak and lo! the mountain was a volcano which, Adelaide always