dreau's "Mrs. White's," Myra Kelly's stories of
her little East Side pupils, and Michelson's "Madigans." It is well to
take duties, and life generally, seriously. It is also well to remember
that a sense of humor is a healthy anti-scorbutic to that portentous
seriousness which defeats its own purpose.

Occasionally bits of self-education proved of unexpected help to the
children in later years. Like other children, they were apt to take to
bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed. One of the
boys, just before his sixteenth birthday, went moose hunting with the
family doctor, and close personal friend of the entire family, Alexander
Lambert. Once night overtook them before they camped, and they had to
lie down just where they were. Next morning Dr. Lambert rather enviously
congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently
did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep; to which the boy
responded, "Well, Doctor, you see it isn't very long since I used to
take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night!"

As the children grew up, Sagamore Hill remained delightful for them.
There were picnics and riding parties, there were dances in the north
room--sometimes fancy dress dances--and open-air plays on the green
tennis court of one of the cousin's houses. The children are no longer
children now. Most of them are men and women, working out their own
fates in the big world; some in our own land, others across the great
oceans or where the Southern Cross blazes in the tropic nights. Some of
them have children of their own; some are working at one thing, some at
another; in cable ships, in business offices, in factories, in newspaper
offices, building steel bridges, bossing gravel trains and steam
shovels, or laying tracks and superintending freight traffic. They have
had their share of accidents and escapes; as I write, word comes from
a far-off land that one of them, whom Seth Bullock used to call "Kim"
because he was the friend of all mankind, while bossing a dangerous
but necessary steel structural job has had two ribs and two back teeth
broken, and is back at work. They have known and they will know joy and
sorrow, triumph and temporary defeat. But I believe they are all the
better off because of their happy and healthy childhood.

It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks,
and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home. No
father and m