f we couldn't, it wouldn't be
fatal to the boy's prospects. It might even help him if he--"

"Help him? If what?"

"If he ever went into polities," said Perkins.

And that was the object-lesson which a kindly fate gave to the
Perkinses in time to prevent their engaging a French maid for the
children.

As to its value as a lesson, as to the value of its results, those
who are familiar with French as spoken by nurse-instructed youths
can best judge.

I am not unduly familiar with that or any other kind of French, but
I have ideas in the matter.

THE CHRISTMAS GIFTS OF THADDEUS

That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last
Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to
the domestics of what he has come to call his "menagerie"--the term
menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state
of affairs in his household--I must go back to the beginning of last
autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between
that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men.
Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem
Thaddeus's course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed
that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the
gladdest, happiest day of all the year.

Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their
attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the
Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such
comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little
family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds
of balsam, lights of tallow, and "fried coffee," possessed no charms
for them. They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark
once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw
it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one.
The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the
estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of
seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the
table and received the indorsement which comes from total
consumption. They were well served, too, these courses; and the two
heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the
butler's pantry, leaving them alone and unobserved, nodded their
satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means
of certain well-established