. I said I never tried to do anything a horse could do better,
and stayed on. Then he got confidential and told me a lot of interesting
crimes this mater of his had committed in her mad efforts to make a
companion of him. Once she'd tramped on the gas of a ninety-horsepower
racer and socked him against a stone wall at a turn some fool had made
in the road; and another time she near drowned him in the Arctic Ocean
when she was off there for the polar-bear hunting; and she'd got him
well clawed by a spotted leopard in India, that was now almost the best
skin in her collection; and once in Switzerland he fell off the side of
an Alp she was making him climb, causing her to be very short with him
all day because it delayed the trip. Tied to a rope he was and hanging
out there over nothing for about fifteen minutes--he must have looked
like a sash weight.

"Then he told about learning to run a motor car all by himself, just to
please the mater. The first time he made the sharp turns round their
country house he took nine shingles off the corner and crumpled a fender
like it was tissue paper; but he stuck to it till he got the score down
to two or three shingles only. He seemed right proud of that, like it
was bogey for the course, as you might say. He wasn't the greatest
humourist in the world, being too high-minded, but he appealed to all my
better instincts; he was trying so hard to make the grade out of respect
for his bedizened and homicidal mother.

"And his poor sister, that come along later, was very much like him,
being severe of outline and wearing the same kind of spectacles, and not
fussing much about the fripperies of dress that engross so many of our
empty-headed sex and get 'em the notice of the male. Her complexion was
brutally honest, which was about all her very best-wishers could say for
it, but she was kind-hearted and earnest, and thought a good deal about
the real or inner meaning of life. What she really yearned for was to
stay in Boston and go to concerts, holding the music on her lap and
checking off the notes with a gold pencil when the fiddlers played them.
I watched her do it one night. I don't know what her notion was, keeping
cases on the orchestra that way; but it seemed to give her a secret
satisfaction. She was also interested in bird life and other studies of
a high character, and she didn't want to be made a companion of by her
rabid parent any more than brother did. They was just a couple of