upon him. I now became the rival--the successful
rival--of the rustling autumn leaves. At my instigation his mother
freed him from his equipage and a little anxiously yet resolutely laid
him in my arms. I dandled him, I chirruped to him, I hummed to him, I
encouraged him to gnaw my watch and to claw my mustache, and presently
I began to toss him up in my hands and let him down again.

"Be careful, Fred," said Josephine, warningly; and I saw a shadow of
solicitude cross my daughter's face, though she was plainly doing her
best to seem unconcerned.

"Pooh," I answered. "I tossed up all my own babies in this way year in
and year out, and not one of them ever got a scratch. I'm not going to
begin by letting my precious grandson fall. Am I, little lamb?"

Thereupon, by way of showing what an adept I was in the art of baby
tossing, I shot him upward with self-confident impetus. To be sure, my
hands never really left him; they followed him as he ascended and as he
came down. Still, pride, the traditional precursor of falls, stood me
in bad stead, as it has stood others before me. Just as my precious
grandson was descending for the third time, one of my wrists seemed to
turn or give way, destroying thereby the admirable balance maintained
by my hands, and, quick as thought, Master Baby slipped from my grasp
and tumbled to the ground.

A horrible wail of mingled pain and fright, which wrung my
heart-strings, welled from the lips of the little lamb, as mother,
father, and grandmother rushed to raise him, knocking their own heads
together in the process. Harold, white as a sheet and with a
son-in-law's curse, as I imagined, trembling on his lips, succeeded in
picking him up. I could discern that my grandson's bald little head
was dabbled with blood. His mother evidently perceived the same, for
she cried, with the maternal fierceness akin to that which we are
taught to associate with a tigress protecting its young:

"Harold, give baby to me, and run for the doctor."

Why is it that at the most solemn and serious junctures of life
thoughts wholly irrelevant to the occasion will arise without our
bidding and thrust themselves into disconcerting prominence? I was not
positive that I had not maimed my grandson for life, though I agree
that his stentorian yell had relieved my solicitude a trifle.
Certainly, it was a moment of cruel torture, which should have
precluded every other consideration from my brain than conce