rying to keep tab on the Twins' weight, for it's important
that they should gain according to schedule. But I've only Dinky-Dunk's
bulky grain-scales, and it's impossible to figure down to anything as
fine as ounces or even quarter-pounds on such a balancer. Yet my
babies, I'm afraid, are not gaining as they ought. Poppsy is especially
fretful of late. Why can't somebody invent children without colic,
anyway? I have a feeling that I ought to run on low gear for a while.
But that's a luxury I can't quite afford.

Last night, when I was dead-tired and trying to give the last licks to
my day's work without doing a Keystone fall over the kitchen table,
Dinky-Dunk said: "Why haven't you ever given a name to this new place?
They tell me you have a genius for naming things--and here we are
still dubbing our home the Harris shack."

"I suppose it ought to be an Indian name, in honor of Ikkie?" I
suggested, doing my best to maintain an unruffled front. And Duncan
Argyll absently agreed that it might just as well.

"Then what's the matter with calling it Alabama?" I mordantly
suggested. "For as I remember it, that means 'Here we rest.' And I can
imagine nothing more appropriate."

I was half-sorry I said it, for the Lord deliver me always from a
sarcastic woman. But I've a feeling that the name is going to stick,
whether we want it or not. At any rate, Alabama Ranch has rather a
musical turn to it....

I wonder if there are any really perfect children in the world? Or do
the good little boys and girls only belong to that sentimentalized
mid-Victorian fiction which tried so hard to make the world like a
cross between an old maid's herb-garden and a Sunday afternoon in a
London suburb? I have tried talking with little Dinkie, and reasoning
with him. I have striven long and patiently to blow his little spark
of conscience into the active flame of self-judgment. And averse as I
am to cruelty and hardness, much as I hate the humiliation of physical
punishment, my poor kiddie and I can't get along without the slipper.
I have to spank him, and spank him soundly, about once a week. I'm
driven to this, or there'd be no sleep nor rest nor roof about our
heads at Alabama Ranch. I don't give a rip what Barrie may have
written about the bringing up of children--for he never had any of his
own! He never had an imperious young autocrat to democratize. He never
had a family to de-barbarize, even though he did write very pretty
books about