An Object-Lesson - Page 2

as standing still; then think of a man illustrious enough for seventy at twenty-five--at the limit of success, with all those years before him, and no progress possible! No, my dear. Don't let's talk of school for Teddy yet."

"I am sure I don't want to force him," said Mrs. Perkins, "but it sometimes seems to me that he needs lessons in discipline. I can't be following around after him all the time, and it seems to me some days that I do nothing but find fault with him. I don't want him to think I'm a stern mother; and when he tells me, as he did yesterday, that he wishes I'd take a vacation for a month, I can't blame him."

"Did he tell you that?" asked Thaddeus, with a chuckle.

"Yes, he did," replied Mrs. Perkins. "I'd kept him in a chair for an hour because he would tease Tommy, and when finally I let him go I told him that he was wearing me out with his naughtiness. About an hour later he came back and said, 'You have an awful hard time bringin' me up, don't you?' I said yes, and added that he might spare me the necessity of scolding him so often, to which he replied that he'd try, but thought it would be better if I'd take a vacation for a month. He hadn't much hope for his own improvement."

Thaddeus shook internally.

"He's perfectly wild, too, at times," Mrs. Perkins continued. "He wants to do such fearful things. I caught him sliding down the banisters yesterday head-foremost, and you know how he was at the Mountain House all summer long. Perfectly irrepressible."

"That's very true," said Thaddeus. "I was speaking of it to the doctor up there, and asked him what he thought I'd better do."

"And what did he say?" asked Mrs. Perkins.

"He stated his firm belief that there was nothing you or I could do to get him down to a basis, but thought Hagenbeck might accomplish something."

"No doubt he thought that," cried Bessie. "No doubt everybody thought that, but it wasn't entirely Teddy's fault. If there is anything in the world that is well calculated to demoralize an active-minded, able-bodied child, it is hotel life. Teddy was egged on to all sorts of indiscretions by everybody in the hotel, from the bell-boys up. If he'd stand on his head on the cashier's desk, the cashier would laugh first, and then, to get rid of him, would suggest that he go into the dining-room and play with the headwaiter; and when he upset the contents of his bait-box in Mrs. Harkaway's lap, she interfered when I scolded him, and said she liked it. What can you do when people talk that way?"

"Get him to upset his bait-box in her lap again," said Thaddeus. "I think if he had been encouraged to do that as a regular thing, every morning for a week, she'd have changed her tune."

"Well, it all goes to