"That was unselfish," said Mr. Pedagog, dryly. "You weren't afraid of treading on one yourself." "How could I?" said the Idiot. "I had all I could do trying to keep my wife from knowing that I was disturbed. It is bad enough to be worried over a crying babe, without being bothered by an irritated husband, so I simply lay there pretending to be asleep and snoring away for dear life." "You are the most considerate man I ever heard of," said Mrs. Pedagog, smiling broadly. "You don't mean to say," said the Poet, with a frown, "that you made your wife get up and take all the trouble and bother--" "I'd only have been in the way," said the Idiot, meekly. "So he kept quiet and pretended to snore like the good old Idiot that he is," put in the Doctor. "And he did the right thing, too," he added. "If all fathers would obliterate themselves on occasions of that sort, and let the mothers rule, the Tommys and Dickies and Harrys would go to sleep a great deal more quickly." "We are rambling," said Mr. Pedagog. "The question of a father's duty towards a teething son has nothing to do with the question of a child's right to dine with his parents." "Oh, I don't know," said the Idiot. "If we are to consider this matter scientifically we must start right. Teething is a natural first step, for if a child hath no teeth, wherewithal shall he eat dinners with his parents or without them?" "That is all very well," retorted Mr. Pedagog, "but to discuss fire-engines intelligently it is not necessary to go back to the times of Elisha to begin it." Mr. Whitechoker--now the Rev. Theophilus Whitechoker, D.D., for he, too, had prospered--smiled deprecatingly. There is no man in the world who more thoroughly appreciates a biblical joke than the prosperous clergyman. "Well," said the Idiot, reflectively, "I quite agree with your proposition that children should dine in the dining-room with their parents and not up-stairs in the nursery, with a lot of tin soldiers and golliwogs. The manners of parents are no better than those of tin soldiers and golliwogs, but their conversation is apt to prove more instructive; and as for the stern father who says his children must dine in the kitchen until they learn better manners, I never had much confidence in him or in his manners, either." "I don't see," said the genial old gentleman who occasionally imbibed, "how you can discipline children in the nursery. If they misbehave in the dining-room you can send them up-stairs to the nursery, but if they misbehave in the nursery, where the deuce can you send them?" "To bed," said Mr. Brief.