nd
had to go back to them at night. But certainly he made every effort to
keep her contented. It was a long steep climb up from the hollow, so
he allowed her to come in a taxi and charge it to his account. Then, on
condition that she would come on Saturdays also, to help him clean up
for Sunday, he allowed her, on that day, to bring her own children too,
and all the puppies played riotously together around the place. But this
he presently discontinued, for the clamour became so deafening that the
neighbours complained. Besides, the young Spaniels, who were a little
older, got Groups, Bunks, and Yelpers into noisy and careless habits of
speech.

He was anxious that they should grow up refined, and was distressed by
little Shaggy Spaniel having brought up the Comic Section of a Sunday
paper. With childhood's instinctive taste for primitive effects, the
puppies fell in love with the coloured cartoons, and badgered him
continually for "funny papers."

There is a great deal more to think about in raising children (he said
to himself) than is intimated in Dr. Holt's book on Care and Feeding.
Even in matters that he had always taken for granted, such as fairy
tales, he found perplexity. After supper--(he now joined the children in
their evening bread and milk, for after cooking them a hearty lunch of
meat and gravy and potatoes and peas and the endless spinach and carrots
that the doctors advise, to say nothing of the prunes, he had no energy
to prepare a special dinner for himself)--after supper it was his habit
to read to them, hoping to give their imaginations a little exercise
before they went to bed. He was startled to find that Grimm and Hans
Andersen, which he had considered as authentic classics for childhood,
were full of very strong stuff--morbid sentiment, bloodshed, horror, and
all manner of painful circumstance. Reading the tales aloud, he edited
as he went along; but he was subject to that curious weakness that
afflicts some people: reading aloud made him helplessly sleepy: after a
page or so he would fall into a doze, from which he would be awakened by
the crash of a lamp or some other furniture. The children, seized with
that furious hilarity that usually begins just about bedtime, would race
madly about the house until some breakage or a burst of tears woke him
from his trance. He would thrash them all and put them to bed howling.
When they were asleep he would be touched with tender compassion, and
steal in