"Well, I can't see it that way," drawled Stanford. "I'm perfectly willing to leave the kids to Marian while they're small; when they're too big for her to handle I'll take 'em in hand. They'll obey _me_, you'd better believe, from the word go. I think as my father did, that a child ought to mind as though he were fired out of a gun." "It seems to me a child is a reasonable being, and has a reasoning being's right to understand something of the whys and wherefores of his obedience," protested Sam, vaguely aware that he was quoting the opinions of someone else. "Besides that, don't they tell us a child's character is pretty well formed by the time he is seven?" "Bosh!" exploded Stanford. "I wouldn't give a brass nickel for all the theories you can bundle together. There were no sort of explanations or mollycoddling coming to me, when I was a kid. It was 'do this, sir'; or 'don't do the other.' I can tell you, I walked a chalk-line till I was sixteen. Why, gracious! if I'd attempted to argue and talk back to my governor the way your boy talks to you--you needn't deny it, for I've heard him myself--I'd have stood up to eat for a week. I've done it more than once for simply looking cross-eyed, and I can tell you it did me good." Sam Brewster eyed his companion with grave interest; there was no animosity in his tone and merely a friendly interest in his face as he inquired: "You walked a chalk-line till you were sixteen, you say; what did you do then?" Young Stanford's handsome dark face reddened slightly. "I--er--well, you see I got red-hot at the pater one day because he--you see I'd grown pretty fast and was as tall as he was, and--er--I balked; thought I was too big to be thrashed, as I deserved. Why, you know what I did as well as I do, Sam. I've always been ashamed of it, of course, and of the trouble I made my mother. She was and is the best mother ever, mild and sweet-tempered; but she couldn't handle _me_. Why, man, I was a holy terror, and my boy Rob is exactly like me." He spoke complacently, almost triumphantly. "I'll take it out of him, though. Watch me!" "Then you don't think we could both learn a thing or two from Judge Lindsay and other specialists about the way to manage and bring up our boys?" persisted Sam, a slow twinkle dawning in his blue eyes. "We know it all--eh? and don't require any enlightenment?" "I know enough to bring up my own boy, I should hope," responded Stanford, with heat. "If he cuts up the way I did, I'll take it out of his young hide some day; that's a sure proposition."