s. "But I don't know what your father and his
friend Oliver P. Morton have to do with Laddie."

"Why, everything on earth! Laddie is father's son, you see, and he is
made like father. None of our other boys is. Not one of them loves
land. Leon is going away as quick as ever he finishes college; but the
more you educate Laddie, the better he likes to make things grow, the
more he loves to make the world beautiful, to be kind to every one, to
gentle animals--why, the biggest fight he ever had, the man he whipped
'til he most couldn't bring him back again, was one who kicked his
horse in the stomach. Gee, I thought he'd killed him! Laddie did too
for a while, but he only said the man deserved it."

"And so he did!" cried the Princess angrily. "How beastly!"

"That's one reason Laddie sticks so close to land. He says he doesn't
meet nearly so many two-legged beasts in the country. Almost every
time he goes to town he either gets into a fight or he sees something
that makes him fighting mad. Princess, you think this beautiful, don't
you?"

I just pointed anywhere. All the world was in it that morning. You
couldn't look right or left and not see lovely places, hear music, and
smell flowers.

"Yes! It is altogether wonderful!" she said.

"Would you like to live among this all your life, and have your plans
made to fix you a place even nicer, and then be forced to leave it and
go to a little room in the city, and make all the money you earned off
of how much other men fight over business, and land and such perfectly
awful things, that they always have to be whispered when Jerry tells
about them? Would you?"

"You little dunce!" she cried.

"I know I'm a fool. I know I'm not telling you a single thing I
should! Maybe I'm hurting Laddie far more than I'm helping him, and if
I am, I wish I would die before I see him; but oh! Princess, I'm
trying with all my might to make you understand how he feels. He WANTS
to do every least thing you'd like him to. He will, almost any thing
else in the world, he would this--he would in a minute, but he just
CAN'T. All of us know he can't! If you'd lived with him since he was
little and always had known him, you wouldn't ask him to; you wouldn't
want him to! You don't know what you're doing! Mother says you don't!
You'll kill him if you send him to the city to live, you just will!
You are doing it now! He's getting thinner and whiter every day.
Don't! Oh please