“How would you like Christina’s puddings with all the raisins left out? Would you mind reading to me?” “As long as you like.” And Morris made him comfortable on the sofa, and read from the lives of ancient warriors until the heir of the ages fell asleep. Fessenden’s mind at this time was a virgin field into which seeds fell to rise again and be tended by a curious young tiller. Those flung into a fertile crevice by Morris, who took the responsibility very seriously, put out their green heads in time. Fessenden nodded his recognition, and, although they were by no means his favorite products, between their insistency and a decreasing lack of opportunity, he arrived, in the course of another year, at the conclusion that it might be interesting to make boys follow his lead without resorting to primitive methods. “I suppose one might as well wait till one has a real call to fight,” he remarked to himself with philosophy. “The animals don’t fight till they have to--none, that is, but dogs, and perhaps that’s living so much with us--we sickin’ them on and all that. It’s good to fight, though,” he added, with a long sigh, “even if the headache does last longer than the fun--that’s a point. Perhaps Mr. Morris is right, although I’d like to know what he knows about it. Maybe I’ll try the other tack and see what there’s in it, but there are some things will make my fists fly till I’m eighty. I guess I wasn’t cut out for a Sunday-school teacher.” Nevertheless, he worked himself into such a terrific rage the next time he was challenged--after an unusual period of virtuous abstinence--that he was thoroughly frightened at the result: for several days he felt flat and peevish, and more worn out in mind than in body. Morris came upon him in the forest where he was seated on a stump dismally chewing a cud, and embraced an obvious opportunity. “After all,” he said sympathetically, “what you fight for is supremacy, is it not? Why not get it some other way? Although you poison yourself with the hate you feel while actually fighting, hate is never the motive of battle with you. You like all these boys well enough, but you must find out who is the best man or burst. Find it out some other way--or rather, having decided that point, try others. Besides, the great man uses the brute force of others, he rarely indulges in it himself. Did not Napoleon sit aloft on a hill while his hundreds of thousands of nameless minions did the fighting? So long as they could see that being whom they looked upon as an emanation from the divine intellect, they were willing to fight like fanatics, but if he had rushed forward with a musket and fallen, the ranks would have scattered in irretrievable panic. Are you cultivating your prowess to fight years hence when a great man orders you out?” “Not much,” growled Fessenden. “Well, take me out in your canoe now. We’ll talk it over further this evening.”