David to the pantomime, and I hope you follow my reasoning,
for I don't. He went with the fairest anticipations, pausing on the
threshold to peer through the hole in the little house called "Pay
Here," which he thought was Red Riding Hood's residence, and asked
politely whether he might see her, but they said she had gone to the
wood, and it was quite true, for there she was in the wood gathering a
stick for her grandmother's fire. She sang a beautiful song about the
Boys and their dashing ways, which flattered David considerably, but she
forgot to take away the stick after all. Other parts of the play were
not so nice, but David thought it all lovely, he really did.

Yet he left the place in tears. All the way home he sobbed in the
darkest corner of the growler, and if I tried to comfort him he struck
me.

The clown had done it, that man of whom he expected things so fair. He
had asked in a loud voice of the middling funny gentleman (then in the
middle of a song) whether he thought Joey would be long in coming, and
when at last Joey did come he screamed out, "How do you do, Joey!" and
went into convulsions of mirth.

Joey and his father were shadowing a pork-butcher's shop, pocketing the
sausages for which their family has such a fatal weakness, and so when
the butcher engaged Joey as his assistant there was soon not a sausage
left. However, this did not matter, for there was a box rather like an
ice-cream machine, and you put chunks of pork in at one end and turned
a handle and they came out as sausages at the other end. Joey quite
enjoyed doing this, and you could see that the sausages were excellent
by the way he licked his fingers after touching them, but soon
there were no more pieces of pork, and just then a dear little Irish
terrier-dog came trotting down the street, so what did Joey do but pop
it into the machine and it came out at the other end as sausages.

It was this callous act that turned all David's mirth to woe, and drove
us weeping to our growler.

Heaven knows I have no wish to defend this cruel deed, but as Joey told
me afterward, it is very difficult to say what they will think funny and
what barbarous. I was forced to admit to him that David had perceived
only the joyous in the pokering of the policeman's legs, and had called
out heartily "Do it again!" every time Joey knocked the pantaloon down
with one kick and helped him up with another.

"It hurts the poor chap," I was told by Joey, whom