't you afraid he will hurt you?" his father asks.

"No," says Bob; "I'll run away."

And the boy has been steadfast in his hatred. He meets the Sultan every
night just before supper, when he insists on being taken right through
the fat, red volume with the star and crescent on the cover; and every
time the Sultan's face appears in the pictures, the boy smites it with
his fist. Bob goes to his meals with an excellent appetite engendered by
his violent encounters with that disreputable monarch.

Abdul Hamid II is in very bad shape from the punishment. Bob has caught
him in the act of addressing the English members of the Balkan
Committee, and left him only a pair of shoulders and one leg. Of the
Sultan driving to the Selamlik every Friday there is visible now only
one of the carriage horses and the fragments of a cavalryman. Nor is the
physical presentment of Abdul Hamid the only thing that has gone to
pieces under Bob's unrelenting hostility. The Sultan's character has
been growing worse and worse as night after night the boy insists upon
new examples of what bad Sultans do.

To satisfy that inexhaustible demand, Harrington has shouldered Abdul
Hamid with all the sins of all the epochs in history. He has made him
steep unhappy Christian prisoners in pitch and burn them for torches,
and send innocent Frenchmen to the guillotine, and tomahawk the Puritan
settlers as they worked in the fields. He has made him responsible for
St. Bartholomew's Day, and Andersonville prison. He has robbed the Czar
of his just credit by making Abdul Hamid the hero of Bloody Sunday in
St. Petersburg. I am not sure but that Harrington has not laid the
abnormally high price of meat and eggs at the Sultan's door. There are
times when I really feel that Harrington should ask Abdul Hamid's
pardon.

But no; he should _not_ beg his pardon. For that is just the point I set
out to make. It is a moral tonic to be brought into touch with Bob's
opinion of Abdul Hamid, and to get to feel that things are not all a
hodge-podge, indifferently good or indifferently bad, as you choose to
look at it. In Bob's world there are good things and bad things, and the
good is good and the bad is bad. Bob knows nothing of the cant which
makes the robber monopolist only the sad victim of forces outside his
control. Bob knows nothing of the sentimental twaddle about that
interesting class of people who are more sinned against than sinning.
Bob, like Nature, indulges in