children, seven of them, for whom nothing was too good or too expensive.

So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he
forbade from seeing him _work_, and planned gentler careers for them.
John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to become a man of letters, and,
in the meantime, ran his own automobile with the corresponding standard
of living such ownership connoted in the college town of New Haven.
Harold and Frederick were down at a millionaires' sons' academy in
Pennsylvania; and Clarence, the youngest, at a prep. school in
Massachusetts, was divided in his choice of career between becoming a
doctor or an aviator. The three girls, two of them twins, were pledged
to be cultured into ladies. Elsie was on the verge of graduating from
Vassar. Mary and Madeline, the twins, in the most select and most
expensive of seminaries, were preparing for Vassar. All of which
required money which Harris Collins did not grudge, but which strained
the earning capacity of his animal-training school. It compelled him to
work the harder, although his wife and the four sons and three daughters
did not dream that he actually worked at all. Their idea was that by
virtue of superior wisdom he merely superintended, and they would have
been terribly shocked could they have seen him, club in hand, thrashing
forty mongrel dogs, in the process of training, which had become excited
and out of hand.

A great deal of the work was done by his assistants, but it was Harris
Collins who taught them continually what to do and how to do it, and who
himself, on more important animals, did the work and showed them how. His
assistants were almost invariably youths from the reform schools, and he
picked them with skilful eye and intuition. Control of them, under their
paroles, with intelligence and coldness on their part, were the
conditions and qualities he sought, and such combination, as a matter of
course, carried with it cruelty. Hot blood, generous impulses,
sentimentality, were qualities he did not want for his business; and the
Cedarwild Animal School was business from the first tick of the clock to
the last bite of the lash. In short, Harris Collins, in the totality of
results, was guilty of causing more misery and pain to animals than all
laboratories of vivisection in Christendom.

And into this animal hell Michael descended--although his arrival was
horizontal, across three thousand five hundred miles, in the same cr