me Aunt Jerusha equipped with that intuitive
knowledge of what to do under any given circumstances that invariably
goes with the status of maiden-aunthood in its acute stages, now
assumed complete control of my destinies; and for a time it looked as
though I were in a fair way to become what the great Egyptian ruler,
King Ptush the Third was referring to in many of his State papers as a
"Meticulous Mollycoddle." To begin with, Aunt Jerusha was a strong
believer in the New Thought School of Infantile Development, and when
I was barely six weeks old she began strapping me on a board like an
Eskimo baby, and suspending me thus restrained to a peg in the wall,
where, helpless, I was required to hang and stare while she implanted
the germs of strength in my soul by reading aloud whole chapters from
the inspired chisellings of the popular seer Ber Nard Pshaw, who was
to the literature of that period what King Ptush was to statecraft. He
was the acknowledged leader of the Neo-Bunkum School of Right
Thinking, and had first attracted the attention of his age by his
famous reply to one who had called him an Egotist.

"I am more than that," he answered. "I am a Megotist. The world is
full of I's, but there is only one Me."

Upon this sort of thing was I fed, not only spiritually but
physically, by my Aunt Jerusha. When, for instance, I found myself
suffering from a pain in my Commissary Department for the sole and
sufficient reason that my nurse had inadvertently handed me the hard
cider jug instead of my noon-day bottle of discosaurus' milk, she
would rattle off some such statement as this: _Thought is everything.
Pain is something. Hence where there is no thought there can be no
pain. Wherefore if you have a pain it is evident that you have a
thought. To be rid of the pain stop thinking._

Then she would fix her eye on mine, and gaze at me sternly in an
effort to remove my sufferings by the hot poultice of her own mushy
reflections instead of getting the peppermint and the hot-water bag.
When night came on and I was restless instead of wooing slumber on my
behalf with soft and soothing lullabies, or telling me fairy-stories
such as children love, she would say: _The child's mind is immature.
His conclusions, therefore, are immature. Whence his decisions as to
what he likes lack maturity, and consequently to give him that for
which he professes to like is equivalent to feeding him on unripe
fruit. So we conclude that what he