When repeated by
Quentin it was obviously an Italian name. I asked who he was and Quentin
responded: "Oh, his father keeps a fruit-stand." However, they got their
bees all right and Quentin took the hive up to a school exhibit.
There some of the bees got out and were left behind ("Poor homeless
miserables," as Quentin remarked of them), and yesterday they at
intervals added great zest to life in the classroom. The hive now
reposes in the garden and Scamp surveys it for hours at a time with
absorbed interest. After a while he will get to investigating it, and
then he will find out more than he expects to.

This afternoon Quentin was not allowed to play ball because of his
cough, so he was keeping the score when a foul tip caught him in the
eye. It was quite a bad blow, but Quentin was very plucky about it and
declined to go in until the game was finished, an hour or so later.
By that time his eye had completely shut up and he now has a most
magnificent bandage around his head over that eye, and feels much like
a baseball hero. I came in after dinner to take a look at him and to my
immense amusement found that he was lying flat on his back in bed saying
his prayers, while Mademoiselle was kneeling down. It took me a moment
or two to grasp the fact that good Mademoiselle wished to impress on him
that it was not right to say his prayers unless he knelt down, and as
that in this case he could not kneel down she would do it in his place!

QUENTIN AND TURNER

(To Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, Cincinnati, Ohio)

Oyster Bay, June 29, 1908.

. . . . .

Quentin is really too funny for anything. He got his legs fearfully
sunburned the other day, and they blistered, became inflamed, and
ever-faithful Mother had to hold a clinic on him. Eyeing his blistered
and scarlet legs, he remarked, "They look like a Turner sunset, don't
they?" And then, after a pause, "I won't be caught again this way! quoth
the raven, 'Nevermore!'" I was not surprised at his quoting Poe, but I
would like to know where the ten-year-old scamp picked up any knowledge
of Turner's sunsets.

QUENTIN AND THE PIG

White House, October 17, 1908.

DEAREST KERMIT:

. . . . .

Quentin performed a characteristic feat yesterday. He heard that
Schmidt, the animal man, wanted a small pig, and decided that he would
turn an honest penny by supplying the want. So out in the neighborhood
of his school he called on an elderly darkey who, he had seen, possessed
l