m, with the sunlight coming in the windows and Miss
Bailey's kind hand resting for a moment now and then in his tousled
hair.

Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin
stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other
tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would
cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realised that
those were things in which he was never to share.

The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to
the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the
bright shining strips of paper were for. He cried because the other
boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher
talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not
understand at all.

He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her starched
gingham dress, became the centre of his tiny world. On bright days
they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and
say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was
being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud
to her: "Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant." Sometimes Nana let him jump on
the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down exactly right it would
bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said "Ah" for a long time
while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.

He loved to take a big cane from the hat-rack and go around hitting
chairs and tables with it and saying: "Fight, fight, fight." When
there were people there the old ladies would cluck at him, which
interested him, and the young ladies would try to kiss him, which he
submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long day was done at five
o'clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice
soft mushy foods with a spoon.

There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token
came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when
he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe
walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes,
and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his
twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were
sleepy--there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the
first years of his marriage when he worked late