“It’s so lonesome—with papa and mamma gone. I try to read, but I can’t seem to get interested in any book. I try the newspapers, but they do put such rubbish in them. You take up a paper and start to read something you thinks interesting, and it goes on and on and on about how somebody—well, Dr. Snodgrass, for instance—” Not a movement from Tracy, not the quiver of a muscle. Sally was amazed —what command of himself he must have! Being disconcerted, she paused so long that Tracy presently looked up wearily and said: “Well?” “Oh, I thought you were not listening. Yes, it goes on and on about this Doctor Snodgrass, till you are so tired, and then about his younger son—_the favorite son_—Zylobalsamum Snodgrass—” Not a sign from Tracy, whose head was drooping again. What supernatural self-possession! Sally fixed her eye on him and began again, resolved to blast him out of his serenity this time if she knew how to apply the dynamite that is concealed in certain forms of words when those words are properly loaded with unexpected meanings. “And next it goes on and on and on about the eldest son—_not_ the favorite, this one—and how he is neglected in his poor barren boyhood, and allowed to grow up unschooled, ignorant, coarse, vulgar, the comrade of the community’s scum, and become in his completed manhood a rude, profane, dissipated ruffian—” That head still drooped! Sally rose, moved softly and solemnly a step or two, and stood before Tracy—his head came slowly up, his meek eyes met her intense ones—then she finished with deep impressiveness— “—named Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass!” Tracy merely exhibited signs of increased fatigue. The girl was outraged by this iron indifference and callousness, and cried out— “What _are_ you made of?” “I? Why?” “Haven’t you _any_ sensitiveness? Don’t these things touch any poor _remnant_ of delicate feeling in you?” “N—no,” he said wonderingly, “they don’t seem to. Why should they?” “O, dear me, _how_ can you look so innocent, and foolish, and good, and empty, and gentle, and all that, right in the hearing of such things as those! Look me in the eye—straight in the eye. There, now then, answer me without a flinch. Isn’t Doctor Snodgrass your father, and isn’t Zylobalsamum your brother,” [here Hawkins was about to enter the room, but changed his mind upon hearing these words, and elected for a walk down town, and so glided swiftly away], “and isn’t your name Spinal Meningitis, and isn’t your father a doctor and an idiot, like all the family for generations, and doesn’t he name all his children after poisons and pestilences and abnormal anatomical eccentricities of the human body? Answer me, some way or somehow—and quick. _Why_ do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it and see me going mad before your face with suspense!”