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establishment and procured a responsible position on the strength of
his easy and graceful personal address and his employment of some of the
most stylish adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he was nearly
seven years old--yes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word of
the schoolbook for it. We should have had a second chapter on this boy.
Probably at nine he was being considered for president of Yale--no,
Harvard. He would know too much to be president of Yale.

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who having
stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up and let the
animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it in his possession.
But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object was
served? To begin with, the boy had absconded with somebody else's fox,
or with somebody's else fox, which is undoubtedly the way a compiler of
school readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes
the morality of the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, he
showed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he not
have swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion shown
by the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy, a messy and
difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture in the tunic he
could have emerged by the front way with ease and dispatch. And what is
the final upshot of it all? The boy falls dead, with a large unsightly
gap in the middle of him. Probably, too, he was a boy whose parents
were raising him for their own purposes. As it is, all gnawed up in
this fashion and deceased besides, he loses his attractions for everyone
except the undertaker. The fox presumably has an attack of acute
indigestion. And there you are! Compare the moral of this with the moral
of any one of the Old Cap Collier series, where virtue comes into its
own and sanity is prevalent throughout and vice gets what it deserves,
and all.

In McGuffey's Third Reader, I think it was, occurred that story about
the small boy who lived in Holland among the dikes and dams, and one
evening he went across the country to carry a few illustrated post cards
or some equally suitable gift to a poor blind man, and on his way back
home in the twilight he discovered a leak in the sea wall. If he
went for help the breach might widen while he was gone and the whole
structure