How can we imagine at this time Julius Caesar and Hannibal Hamlin and Lucretia Borgia at some time or other stubbed their bare toes against a root and filled the horizon with pianissimo wails. The barefoot boy of spring will also proceed to bathe in the river as soon as the ice and the policeman are out. He will choose a point on the boulevard, where he can get a good view of those who pass, and in company with eleven other little barefoot boys, he will clothe himself in an Adam vest, a pair of bare-skin pantaloons, a Greek slave overcoat and a yard of sunlight, and gaze earnestly at those who go by on the other side. Up and down the bank, pasting each other with mud, the little barefoot boys of spring chase each other, with their vertebrae sticking into the warm and sleepy air, while down in the marsh, where the cat-tails and the broad flags and the peach can and the deceased horse grow, the bull-frog is twittering to his mate. [Illustration: A TESTIMONIAL OF REGARD.] Later on, the hoarse voice of a rude parental snorter is heard approaching, and twelve slim Cupids with sunburned backs are inserted into twelve little cotton shirts and twelve despondent pairs of pantaloons hang at half-mast to twelve home-made suspenders, and as the gloaming gathers about the old home, twelve boys back up against the ice-house to cool off, while the enraged parent hangs up the buggy whip in the old place. Favored a Higher Fine. Will Taylor, the son of the present American Consul at Marseilles, was a good deal like other boys while at school in his old home, at Hudson, Wis. One day he called his father into the library, and said: “Pa, I don't like to tell you, but the teacher and I have had trouble.” “What's the matter now?” “Well, I cut one of the desks a little with my knife, and the teacher says I've got to pay a dollar or take a lickin'.” “Well, why don't you take the licking and say nothing more about it? I can stand considerable physical pain, so long as it visits our family in that form. Of course, it is not pleasant to be flogged, but you have broken a rule of the school, and I guess you'll have to stand it. I presume that the teacher will in wrath remember mercy, and avoid disabling you so that you can't get your coat on any more.” “But, pa, I feel mighty bad about it already, and if you'd pay my fine I'd never do it again. I know a good deal more about it now, and I will never do it again. A dollar ain't much to you, pa, but it's a heap to a boy that hasn't got a cent. If I could make a dollar as easy as you can, pa, I'd never let my little boy get flogged that way just to save a dollar. If I had a little feller that got licked bekuz I didn't put up for him, I'd hate the sight of money always. I'd feel as if every dollar in my pocket had been taken out of my little kid's back.”