the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's
sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn
we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read
of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall
when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the
quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses.
I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those
hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty,
sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus
zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect
and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight
with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric
American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons
with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as
often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a
child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen,
and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me
my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me
was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one
afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.
And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Maerchen" that
I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to
learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them,
they ran like this:
For Ingo to learn English will very easy be
If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me;
Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,
And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes--
Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend:
To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend.
If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot
get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.
HOUSEBROKEN
After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he
needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew
his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening
spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no
two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for
something m
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