"Is somebody very sick?" The head under the weather-roughened hat nodded silently. "I wonder how it happens that all the sick are in our neighborhood." A smile flitted across the doctor's mouth. "The sick are in all neighborhoods, little wonderer." He said this cheerfully. It was his idea--and he tried to enforce it at home--that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance of the words _bad_ and _sad_--nor of the realities that are masked behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes. Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all growing apple trees. "Not all over the world?" asked the boy, enlarging his vision in space. "All over the world," admitted the doctor with entire cheerfulness; the fact was a matter of no consequence. "Not all the time?" asked the boy, enlarging his outlook in time. "All the time! All over the world and all the time!" conceded the doctor, as though this made not the slightest difference to a human being. "Isn't there a single minute when everybody is well everywhere?" "Not a single, solitary minute." "Then somebody must always be suffering." The doctor nodded again; the matter was not worth speaking of. "Then somebody else must always be sorry." The doctor bowed encouragingly. "_Then I am sorry, too!_" This time the doctor did not move his head, and he did not open his lips. He saw that a new moment had arrived in the boy's growth--a consciousness of the universal tragedy and personal share and sorrow in it. He knew that many people never feel this; some feel it late; a few feel it early; he had always said that children should never feel it. He knew also that when once it has begun, it never ends. Nothing ever banishes it or stills it--that perception of the human tragedy and one's share and sorrow in it. He did not welcome its appearance now, in his son least of all. For an instant he charged himself with having made a mistake in taking the child along on his visits to the sick, thus making known too early the dark side of happy neighborhood life. Then he went further back and traced this premature seriousness to its home and its beginning: in prenatal depression--in a mother's anguish and a wife's despair. It was a bitter retrospect: it kept him brooding. The chatter was persistent. A hand was stretched up, and it took hold of his chin and shook it:-- "There ought to be a country where nobody suffers and there ought to be a time; a large country and a long time." "There is such a country and there is such a time, Herbert," said the doctor, now with some sadness.