I let fall insidiously, “I wonder how the angleworms like it?” The little god stared at me with startled eyes; and then at the worms. He looked at them as though he saw them for the first time. His tender young face was fairly vacant with his surprise before a new idea. Then he began slowly to climb over the wire-netting. When I went back to the dahlia-bed, he was carefully burying the angleworms again. His young face wore an expression of puzzled bewilderment. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS When the elders of our family could think of nothing else to worry about they put in their time to good advantage on little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley. Yes--Maria Pearl--that was really the poor child’s name, given in baptism. You can see that her troubles began early. That name was symbolical of what her life was to be, sharply divided between her mother’s family (they were the ones who insisted on the Maria) and her father’s folks, who stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died before she was born, and her mother lived only a few months after the baby came, and was so mortally ill that no one thought of naming the poor little girl. It was after her mother’s death, when the two hostile families could collect themselves, that the long struggle over the child began by giving her that name. Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the year, the period when she stayed with the Purdons; and Pearl the other half-year, when she was with her father’s family, the Manleys. “The poor little tyke, not even a fixed name of her own,” my grandmother used to say, pitying the child’s half-yearly oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be in either one!” The circle of compassionate elders used to continue, “Dear, dear! What can the poor little thing ever learn, with such awful examples always before her eyes.”