"Never you mind about the children's epidemic! I'll take care of the children's epidemic," repeated the doctor, pulling the long-faced, autumn-faced prodigy of all questions between his knees and looking him over with secret solicitude. "We'll not talk about sick children, but about two well children--thanked be the Father of all children! So you and Elsie are going away to help celebrate a Christmas Tree." "Yes; but when are you going to have a Christmas Tree of our own?" Now, that subject had two prongs, and the doctor seized the prong that did not pierce family affairs--did not pierce _him_. He settled down to the subject with splendid warmth and heartiness:-- "Well, let me see! You may have your first Christmas Tree as soon as you are old enough to commence to do things for other people; as soon as you can receive into your head the smallest hard pill of an idea about your duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine takers. Can you understand that?" "Gracious! That would be a _big_ pill--larger than my head! I don't see what it has to do with one miserable little dead pine tree!" The doctor roared. "It has this to do with one miserable dead pine tree: don't you know yet that Christmas Trees are in memory of a boy who was once exactly your age and height--and perhaps with your appetite--and with just as many eyes and possibly even more questions? The boy grew up to be a man. The man became a teacher. The teacher became a neighborhood doctor. The neighborhood doctor became the greatest physician of the world--and he never took a fee!" "Ah, yes! But he wasn't a better doctor than _you_ are, was he? If he'd come into this neighborhood and tried to practise, you'd soon have ousted him, wouldn't you, with your doses and soups and jellies?" "Humph!" grunted the doctor with a wry twist of the mouth; "I suppose I would! Yes; undoubtedly I'd have ousted him! He could never have competed with me in _my_ practice; never! But we won't try that hard little pill of an idea any more. We'll drop the subject of Christmas Trees for one more year. Perhaps by that time you can take the pill as a powder! So! I hear you are going to attend a dancing party; we'll talk about the party. And you are going over there to stay all night. I wish I were going. I wish I were going over there to stay all night," reiterated the man, with an outrush of solemn tenderness that reached back through vain years, through so many parched, unfilled years. "I wish so, too," cried the boy, instantly burying his face on his father's coat-sleeve, then lifting it again and looking at him with a guilty flush which the doctor did not observe. "Oh, do you! We won't say anything more about that, though I'm glad you'd like to have me along. Now then; go and have a good time! And take long steps and large mouthfuls! And you might do well to remember that a boy's stomach is not a birdnest to be lined with candy eggs."