pect her dolls to assure herself that
they are both well-behaved and spotless as to apparel, for Pauline
Augusta is a stickler as to decorum and cleanliness; and Dinkie falls
to working on his air-ship, which he is this time making quite
independent of Whinnie, whose last creation along that line betrayed a
disheartening disability for flight. But even this second effort, I'm
afraid, is doomed to failure, for more than once I've seen Dinkie back
away and stand regarding his incompetent flier with a look of
frustration on his face. He is always working over machinery--for he
loves anything with wheels--and I'm pretty well persuaded that the
twentieth-century mania of us grown-ups for picking ourselves to
pieces is nothing more than a development of this childish hunger to
get the cover off things and see the works go round. Dinkie makes
wagons and carts and water-wheels, but some common fatality of
incompetence overtakes them all and they are cast aside for
enterprises more novel and more promising. He announces, now, that he
intends to be an engineer. And that recalls the time when I was
convinced in my own soul that he was destined for a life of art, since
he was forever asking me to draw him "a li'l' man," and later on fell
to drawing them himself. He would do his best to inscribe a circle
and then emboss it with perfectly upright hair, as though the person
in question had just been perusing the most stirring of
penny-dreadfuls. Then he would put in two dots of eyes, and one
abbreviated and vertical line for the nose, and another elongated and
horizontal line for the mouth, and arms with extended and extremely
elocutionary fingers, to say nothing of extremely attenuated legs
which invariably toed-out, to make more discernible the silhouette of
the ponderously booted feet. I have several dozen of these "li'l' men"
carefully treasured in an old cigar-box. But he soon lost interest in
these purely anthropocentric creations and broadened out into the
delineation of boats and cars and wheel-barrows and rocking-chairs and
tea-pots, lying along the floor on his stomach for an hour at a time,
his tongue moving sympathetically with every movement of his pencil.
He held the latter clutched close to the point by his stubby little
fingers.

I had to call a halt on all such artistry, however, for he startled
me, one day, by suddenly going crosseyed. It came, of course, from
working with his nose too close to the paper. I imagined