the jocund blitheness out of the open prairie and give an air of
pathos and solitude to my own children playing about my feet. Sorolla,
I remembered, had little ones of his own. He _knew_. Life had taught
him, and in teaching, had enriched his art. For the artist, after all,
is the man who cuts up the loaf of his own heart, and butters it with
beauty, and at tuppence a slice hands it to the hungry children of the
world.

So when Dinky-Dunk laughed at me, for going into a trance over my own
children, I merely smiled condoningly back at him. I felt vaguely
sorry for him. He wasn't getting out of them what I was getting. He
was being cheated, in some way, out of the very harvest for which he
had sowed and waited. And if he had come to me, in that mood of
relapse, if he had come to me with the slightest trace of humility,
with the slightest touch of entreaty, on his face, I'd have hugged his
salt-and-peppery old head to my bosom and begged to start all over
again with a clean slate....

Gershom and I get along much better than I had expected. There's
nothing wrong with the boy except his ineradicable temptation to
impart to you his gratuitous tidbits of information. I can't object,
of course, to Gershom having a college education: what I object to is
his trying to give me one. I don't mind his wisdom, but I do hate to
see him tear the whole tree of knowledge up by the roots and floor
one with it. He has just informed me that there are estimated to be
30,000,000,000,000 red blood corpuscles in this body of mine, and I
made him blink by solemnly challenging him to prove it. Quite
frequently and quite sternly, too, he essays to correct my English. He
reproved me for saying: "Go to it, Gershom!" And he declared I was in
error in saying "The goose hangs high," as that was merely a vulgar
corruption for "The goose whangs high," the "whanging" being the call
of the wild geese high in the air when the weather is settled and
fair. We live and learn!

But I can't help liking this pedagogic old Gershom who takes himself
and me and all the rest of the world so seriously. I like him because
he shares in my love for Dinkie and stands beside Peter himself in the
fondly foolish belief that Dinkie has somewhere the hidden germ of
greatness in him. Not that my boy is one of those precocious little
bounders who are so precious in the eyes of their parents and so
odious to the eyes of the rest of the world. He is a large-boned boy,
almost