The Idiot at Home

"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.

"Never!" cried the Idiot. "Children, Mr. Brief, as I understand them – and I have known three very well; myself as a boy, and Tommy and Mollie – children, as I understand them, are never naughty for the mere fun of being so. Their wickedness grows out of their wonderful stores of unexpended and unexpendable energy. Take my son Thomas on last Saturday afternoon, for instance. It was a rainy Saturday, and Tommy, instead of being out-of-doors all morning and afternoon getting rid of his superfluous vitality, had been cooped up in the house all day doing nothing. Shortly before dinner we had a difference of opinion which lasted for more time than I like to think about. I was tired and irritable. Tommy wasn't tired, but he was irritable, and, from his point of view, was as right as I was. He had the best of me to the extent that I was tired and he wasn't. I had the best of him to the extent that I had authority and he hadn't – "

"And who came out ahead?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"I did," said the Idiot, "because I was bigger than he was; but what I was going to say was this: Mr. Brief would have sent him to bed, thereby adding to the boy's stock of energy, already too great for his little mind to control."

"And what did you do?" asked Mr. Brief.

"Nothin'," said a small but unmistakably masculine voice from behind the portieres.

"Thomas!" said the Idiot, severely, as all turned to see who had spoken.

A little figure clad in white, ably supported by a still smaller figure, also clad in white, but with an additional ruffle about the neck, both of them barefooted, appeared in the doorway.

"Why, Mollie!" said Mrs. Idiot.

"We comed down to thee how you wath gettin' along," said the little girl.

"Yes, we did," said the boy. "But he didn't do a thing to me that day," he added, climbing on his father's knee and snuggling down against his vest-pocket with a sweet little sigh of satisfaction. "Did you, pa?"

"Yes, Thomas," said the Idiot. "Don't you remember that I ignored you utterly?"

"Yes, I do," said Tommy. "But I'd rather be spanked than not noticed at all."

"I am afraid," said Mr. Pedagog a few hours later, as he and Mrs. Pedagog were returning home, "I am very much afraid that the Idiot's children are being spoiled."

"I hope they are!" returned the good lady, "for really, John, I never knew a boy or a girl to grow into man or womanhood and amount to anything who hadn't been spoiled in childhood. Spoiling is another name for the attitude of parents who make comrades of their children and who do not set themselves up as tyrants – "

"But the veneration of a child for his father and mother – " Mr. Pedagog began.

"Should not degenerate into the awe which one feels for an unrelenting despot!" interrupted Mrs. Pedagog.

The old gentleman discreetly retired from the field.

As for Mrs. and Mr. Idiot, they retired that night satisfied with the evening's diversion, and just before he turned out the light the Idiot walked into the nursery to say good-night to the children.

"You're a good old pop!" said Tommy, with an affectionate hug. "The best I ever had!"

As for Mollie, she was sleeping soundly, with a smile on her placid little face which showed that, "spoiled" as she was, she was happy; and what should the Idiot or any one else seek to bring into a child's life but happiness?

III

IN THE LIBRARY

The Bibliomaniac had come off into the country to spend Sunday with the Idiot, and, as fortune would have it, Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog also appeared on the scene. After the mid-day dinner the little party withdrew to the library, where the Bibliomaniac began to discourse somewhat learnedly upon his hobby.

"I am glad to see, my dear Idiot," he observed, as he glanced about the room at the well-filled shelves, "that as you grow older you are cultivating a love of good literature."

"I heartily echo the sentiment," said Mr. Pedagog, as he noted the titles of some of the volumes. "I may add that I am pleasurably surprised at some of your selections. I never knew, for instance, that you cared for Dryden, and yet I see here on the top shelf a voluminous edition of that poet."

"Yes," said the Idiot. "I have found Dryden very useful indeed. Particularly in that binding and in so many volumes. The color goes very well with the hangings, and the space the books occupy, eked out by a dozen others of the same color, gives to that top shelf all the esthetic effect of an attractive and tasteful frieze. Then, too, it is always well," he added, with a sly wink at Mrs. Idiot, "to have a lot of books for a top shelf that is difficult to reach that nothing under the canopy could induce you to read. It is not healthful to be stretching upward, and with Dryden upon the top shelf my wife and I are never tempted to undermine our constitutions by taking him down."

The Bibliomaniac laughed.

"Your view is at least characteristic," said he, "and to tell you the absolute truth, I do not know that your judgment of the literary value of Dryden is at variance with my own. Somebody called him the Greatest Poet of a Little Age. Perhaps if the age had been bigger he'd not have shone so brilliantly."

"Lowell," observed Mr. Pedagog, "was responsible for that remark, if I remember rightly, and I have no doubt it is a just one, and yet I do not hold it up against Dryden. Man does not make the age. The age makes the man. Had there been any inspiring influences at work to give him a motive, an incentive, Dryden might have been a greater poet. To excel his fellows was all that could rightly be expected of him, and that he did."

"Assuredly," said the Idiot. "That has always been my view, and to-day we benefit by it. If he had gone directly to oblivion, Mrs. Idiot and I should have been utterly at a loss to know what to put on that top shelf."

The Idiot offered his visitors a cigar.

"Thank you," said the Bibliomaniac, taking his and sniffing at it with all the airs and graces of a connoisseur.

"I don't know but that I will join you," said Mr. Pedagog. "I did not smoke until I was fifty, and I suppose I ought not to have taken it up then, but I did, and I have taken a great deal of comfort out of it. My allowance is fifty-two cigars a year, one for each Sunday afternoon," he added, with a kindly smile.

"Well, you want to look out you don't get smoker's heart," said the Idiot. "When a man plunges into a bad habit as rashly as that, he wants to pull up before it is too late."

"I have felt no ill effects since the first one," rejoined Mr. Pedagog. "But you, my dear Idiot, how about your allowance? Is it still as great as ever? As I remember you in the old days you were something of a cigarette fiend."

"I smoke just as much, but with this difference: I do not smoke for pleasure any more, Mr. Pedagog," the Idiot replied. "As a householder I smoke from a sense of duty. It keeps moths out of the house, and insects from the plants."

The Bibliomaniac meanwhile had been investigating the contents of the lower shelves.

"You've got a few rare things here, I see," he observed, taking up a volume of short sketches illustrated by Leech, in color. "This small tome is worth its weight in gold. Where did you pick it up?"

"Auction," said the Idiot. "I didn't buy it by weight, either. I bought it by mistake. The colored pictures fascinated me, and when it was put up I bawled out 'fifteen.' Another fellow said 'sixteen.' I wasn't going to split nickels so I bid 'twenty.' So we kept at it until it was run up to 'thirty-six.' Then I thought I'd break the other fellow's heart by bidding fifty, and it was knocked down to me."