"Say! She'd ought to gone to school to him for a while! He's the worst principal to chew about manners I ever saw." "Gee! Do you s'pose vacation'll ever get here?" sighed Sube. "It don't ack like it," replied Gizzard dubiously. "Last week was about six months long, and there was one day of vacation at that." "Seems to me as if time was goin' backwards," complained Sube. But it was not. It was going forward at its regular speed. The difficulty was that the boys' minds were outstripping it. In due time vacation arrived, and a long happy summer stretched itself out before them. Mr. Cane believed in vacations. He also believed in teaching boys to be industrious. He still harbored the old-fashioned idea that every boy should be required to do some useful work every day of his life, Sundays excepted. And while Sube and his brothers with their more up-to-date point of view could see the fallacy of his position, they were unable to reform him with any amount of argument. As Sube seated himself at the breakfast table one morning and glanced over his working orders for the day, a scowl came over his usually sunny countenance. "What's the good of callin' it a vacation if a feller has to labor all the time?" he muttered. Mr. Cane glanced at Sube over the top of his newspaper as he replied: "Now we are not going to open up that old discussion again. The way you boys take on over an hour's work around the place makes me sick! Why, when I was your age, Sube, I was glad to work from daylight until dark for just my board; and it wasn't any such board as you boys get, either." "Yes, I'll bet you were glad," growled Sube. "Certainly I was glad," his father assured him. "In those days boys expected to work. They weren't brought up with the idea of lolling at ease that you boys seem to have." "Did you work every day?" asked Cathead. "Every day." "Every single day?" "Certainly." "Didn't you ever take a day off?" "Oh, occasionally I'd take a day off to go fishing or do a little studying--" "I don't s'pose they had circuses in those days," interjected Sube. "Oh, perhaps once during the summer my father would take me to see a good dog and animal show," explained Mr. Cane as he folded his napkin and left the table. "They didn't use to go in swimmin' in those days, did they?" Sube muttered, taking care that his father did not hear. "Or play ball?" supplemented Cathead cautiously. "Ain't that jus' like a man?" growled Sube as the door closed behind their father. "Give a feller a lot of work to do and not even let him _kick_ about it!" "What you gotta do, anyway?" asked Cathead. "Plenty," grunted Sube; "plenty." "Well--I cut it the last time," ventured Cathead. "It's your turn." "Yes, but it takes about half a day to cut the ol' lawn," grumbled Sube. "I'll bet your job won't take you half an hour. What you got to do, anyway?" "Me? Oh, I got to thin the beets."