The mother rose quickly, Nancy trampling on Annunziata. Her face was pale. “This is disobedience,” she said in a shaken voice, “and it must have its punishment. It is the third time, within three months, that he has needed punishment. The first time was the eggs. The second time it was the spectacles. And now, it is—insubordination.” Her heart contracted with suffering. Insubordination! A large word to use on so small a being! Ah, yes, the eggs, and the spectacles! The young father remembered the eggs and the spectacles; and even in the midst of a misery scarcely less acute than the mother’s, a smile twitched his lips. The eggs! In brief, little Samuel, at the age of quarter before three, had noted with a curious eye that Matilda, the brown hen, had one egg that differed from others. It was hard, white, shiny; it had nothing of the soft, pale-brown, pleasant egg-color the other eggs had. One day he took it out of the nest to consider it. He put it on the barn floor. There was a hammer near at hand. Samuel liked hammers. With the hammer, he struck the china egg once, twice, thrice. Nothing happened. Curious! He then put one of the pleasant egg-colored eggs on the floor. He struck it but once, and his whole world dissolved into a filthy chaos not to be borne. Overwhelmed with remorse and bad-egg juice, he fled in terror to his mother. He wept so long and earnestly that she considered him punished enough. As for the spectacles, there was an evil deed for you! His grandmother had set her spectacles on the tall mantel-shelf, just under the picture of sorrowful flowers made from the hair of young and old. Most of the flowers were black, or white, or brownish drab. Samuel did not like the picture, but the spectacles had always interested him. He dragged a chair to the mantel, and by heroic climbing, reached them. He seldom broke things, his motions being accurate, and he came down to earth with the spectacles unharmed. What to do with them? And there was grandmother’s lace cap, too. How about Ajax, the sheep-dog? Not without difficulty, but without mishap, Samuel was forcing the glasses upon Ajax, when help came to the good dog, and in the person of the master of the house. At the sight of the woe-begone spectacled animal, and the lace cap, no longer what it once was, Samuel’s father had laughed so loud and long that both parents agreed that punishment would be inconsistency itself. But now, with little Samuel sitting defiant on his work of art, a picture of insubordination, punishment could no longer be delayed. The mother put her arms around her husband’s neck. “Oh, remember how tiny he is, Abel,” she wailed. “I shall stay in the kitchen till it’s done.” She ran into the cold, dark kitchen, where she knelt in anguish, an ear against the keyhole.