ks, old man, for telling me," he
said warmly.

"Whew! What a chance for a comeback he would have had on Slim!" said the
Captain that night as the campers sat around in an informal family
council while the twins were out in the launch with Mr. Evans. "The fact
that he didn't take it shows that he's a pretty good sort after all. I
didn't think he had it in him."

"Do you know," said Katherine seriously, "I believe I know what's been
the trouble with Anthony. He was spoiled when he was little and allowed
to talk all the time and that made people dislike him. It made him
unpopular with his boy friends and he's been unpopular so long that he
expects everybody he meets to dislike him. So he starts to patronize and
bully his new acquaintances right away because he thinks they won't like
him anyway and it's his way of getting even. But I believe that
underneath it he's the loneliest boy that ever lived. Nobody can have a
very good time or really enjoy life when they're disliked by everybody.

"Now I think we made a mistake in our treatment of him from the start.
We didn't like him when we first saw him and we let him know it. We
froze him out in the beginning. I know how I feel toward people that I
think don't like me. They bring out the worst side of me every time. Now
Anthony must have a lot of good stuff in him or he couldn't have acted
the way he did today. It's up to us to bring it out, and I think the way
to do it is to treat him as if we thought there was nothing but a 'best'
side to him. We mustn't act as if we thought he was going to do
something mean all the time. Take, for instance, the time we thought
somebody had hidden Eeny-Meeny, and you jumped on him as a matter of
course."

"We thought he'd be likely to do it," said the Captain, trying to
justify himself before Katherine's reproach.

"That's exactly the trouble," said Katherine. "We always thought he'd be
'likely' to do something mean, but we never thought he'd be 'likely' to
do something good. Everything that has happened around here has been
blamed on Anthony as a matter of course. We've never given him a fair
chance. You boys didn't let him in on the secret of those council seats
because you were afraid he'd give it away. That was wrong. You should
have let him help and never doubted him for a minute. People generally
do just what you expect them to do. If we took Anthony seriously and
acted as though we could rely on his judgment he'd soon have a judgm