at can happen in this world. I was to see a small
child die. I was to watch my own Pee-Wee pass quietly away.

I have often wondered, since, why I never shed a tear during all those
terrible three days. I couldn't, in some way, though the nurse herself
was crying, and poor old Whinnie and Struthers were sobbing together
next to the window, and dour old Dinky-Dunk, on the other side of the
bed, was racking his shoulders with smothered sobs as he held the
little white hand in his and the warmth went forever out of the little
fingers where his foolish big hand was trying to hold back the life
that couldn't be kept there. The old are ready to die, or can make
themselves ready. They have run their race and had their turn at
living. But it seems cruel hard to see a little tot, with eagerness
still in his heart, taken away, taken away with the wonder of things
still in his eyes. It stuns you. It makes you rebel. It leaves a scar
that Time itself can never completely heal.

Yet through it all I can still hear the voice of valorous old Whinnie
as he patted my shoulder and smiled with the brine still in the seams
of his furrowed old face. "We'll thole through, lassie; we'll thole
through!" he said over and over again. Yes; we'll thole through. And
this is only the uncovering of old wounds. And one must keep one's
heart and one's house in order, for with us we still have the living.

But Dinky-Dunk can't completely understand, I'm afraid, this morbid
hankering of mine to keep my family about me, to have the two chicks
that are left to me close under my wing. And never once, since Pee-Wee
went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may be wrong,
but I can't help it. I don't want memories of violence to be left
corroding and rankling in my mind. And I'd hate to see any child of
mine cringe, like an ill-treated dog, at every lift of the hand. There
are better ways of controlling them, I begin to feel, than through
fear. Their father, I know, will never agree with me on this matter.
He will always insist on mastery, open and undisputed mastery, in his
own house. He is the head of this Clan McKail, the sovereign of this
little circle. For we can say what we will about democracy, but when
a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple.
He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even
seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old
fabrication about the divine ri