him any day--you don't like to
spank him, though he might be turning out a little fiend, as delicate
children often do. Suppose you gave a child a hammering, and the same
night he took convulsions, or something, and died--how'd you feel about
it? You never know what a child is going to take, any more than you can
tell what some women are going to say or do.

I was very fond of Jim, and we were great chums. Sometimes I'd sit
and wonder what the deuce he was thinking about, and often, the way he
talked, he'd make me uneasy. When he was two he wanted a pipe above all
things, and I'd get him a clean new clay and he'd sit by my side, on the
edge of the verandah, or on a log of the wood-heap, in the cool of the
evening, and suck away at his pipe, and try to spit when he saw me do
it. He seemed to understand that a cold empty pipe wasn't quite the
thing, yet to have the sense to know that he couldn't smoke tobacco
yet: he made the best he could of things. And if he broke a clay pipe
he wouldn't have a new one, and there'd be a row; the old one had to be
mended up, somehow, with string or wire. If I got my hair cut, he'd
want his cut too; and it always troubled him to see me shave--as if he
thought there must be something wrong somewhere, else he ought to have
to be shaved too. I lathered him one day, and pretended to shave him:
he sat through it as solemn as an owl, but didn't seem to appreciate
it--perhaps he had sense enough to know that it couldn't possibly be the
real thing. He felt his face, looked very hard at the lather I scraped
off, and whimpered, 'No blood, daddy!'

I used to cut myself a good deal: I was always impatient over shaving.

Then he went in to interview his mother about it. She understood his
lingo better than I did.

But I wasn't always at ease with him. Sometimes he'd sit looking into
the fire, with his head on one side, and I'd watch him and wonder what
he was thinking about (I might as well have wondered what a Chinaman
was thinking about) till he seemed at least twenty years older than me:
sometimes, when I moved or spoke, he'd glance round just as if to see
what that old fool of a dadda of his was doing now.

I used to have a fancy that there was something Eastern, or
Asiatic--something older than our civilisation or religion--about
old-fashioned children. Once I started to explain my idea to a woman I
thought would understand--and as it happened she had an old-fashioned
child, with very slant