LITMIR.BIZ

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Miss Circe, “and it’s so awfully nice. See!” she continued, putting one of the delicacies in her own pretty mouth with every assumption of delight. “It’s SO good!” Johnnyboy rested his elbows on her knees, and watched her with a grieved and commiserating superiority. “Bimeby, you’ll have pains in youse tommick, and you’ll be tookt to bed,” he said sadly, “and then you’ll—have to dit up and”—But as it was found necessary here to repress further details, he escaped other temptation.

      Two hours later, as Miss Circe was seated in the drawing-room with her usual circle of enthusiastic admirers around her, Johnnyboy—who was issued from his room for circulation, two or three times a day, as a genteel advertisement of his parents—floated into the apartment in a new dress and a serious demeanor. Sidling up to Miss Circe he laid a phial—evidently his own pet medicine—on her lap, said, “For youse tommikake to-night,” and vanished. Yet I have reason to believe that this slight evidence of unusual remembrance on Johnnyboy’s part more than compensated for its publicity, and for a few days Miss Circe was quite “set up” by it.

      It was through some sympathy of this kind that I first gained Johnnyboy’s good graces. I had been presented with a small pocket case of homoeopathic medicines, and one day on the beach I took out one of the tiny phials and, dropping two or three of the still tinier pellets in my hand, swallowed them. To my embarrassment, a small hand presently grasped my trouser-leg. I looked down; it was Johnnyboy, in a new and ravishing smuggler suit, with his questioning eyes fixed on mine.

      “Howjer do dat?”

      “Eh?”

      “Wajer do dat for?”

      “That?—Oh, that’s medicine. I’ve got a headache.”

      He searched the inmost depths of my soul with his wonderful eyes. Then, after a pause, he held out his baby palm.

      “You kin give Johnny some.”

      “But you haven’t got headache—have you?”

      “Me alluz has.”

      “Not ALWAYS.”

      He nodded his head rapidly. Then added slowly, and with great elaboration, “Et mo’nins, et affernoons, et nights, ‘nd mo’nins adain. ‘N et becker” (i. e., breakfast).

      There was no doubt it was the truth. Those eyes did not seem to be in the habit of lying. After all, the medicine could not hurt him. His nurse was at a little distance gazing absently at the sea. I sat down on a bench, and dropped a few of the pellets into his palm. He ate them seriously, and then turned around and backed—after the well-known appealing fashion of childhood—against my knees. I understood the movement—although it was unlike my idea of Johnnyboy. However, I raised him to my lap—with the sensation of lifting a dozen lace-edged handkerchiefs, and with very little more effort—where he sat silently for a moment, with his sandals crossed pensively before him.

      “Wouldn’t you like to go and play with those children?” I asked, pointing to a group of noisy sand levelers not far away.

      “No!” After a pause, “You wouldn’t neither.”

      “Why?”

      “Hediks.”

      “But,” I said, “perhaps if you went and played with them and ran up and down as they do, you wouldn’t have headache.”

      Johnnyboy did not answer for a moment; then there was a perceptible gentle movement of his small frame. I confess I felt brutally like Belcher. He was getting down.

      Once down he faced me, lifted his frank eyes, said, “Do way and play den,” smoothed down his smuggler frock, and rejoined his nurse.

      But although Johnnyboy afterwards forgave my moral defection, he did not seem to have forgotten my practical medical ministration, and our brief interview had a surprising result. From that moment he confounded his parents and doctors by resolutely and positively refusing to take any more of their pills, tonics, or drops. Whether from a sense of loyalty to me, or whether he was not yet convinced of the efficacy of homoeopathy, he did not suggest a substitute, declare his preferences, or even give his reasons, but firmly and peremptorily declined his present treatment. And, to everybody’s astonishment, he did not seem a bit the worse for it.

      Still he was not strong, and his continual aversion to childish sports and youthful exercise provoked the easy criticism of that large part of humanity who are ready to confound cause and effect, and such brief moments as the Sluysdaels could spare him from their fashionable duties were made miserable to them by gratuitous suggestions and plans for their child’s improvement. It was noticeable, however, that few of them were ever offered to Johnnyboy personally. He had a singularly direct way of dealing with them, and a precision of statement that was embarrassing.

      One afternoon, Jack Bracy drove up to the veranda of the Crustacean with a smart buggy and spirited thoroughbred for Miss Circe’s especial driving, and his own saddle-horse on which he was to accompany her. Jack had dismounted, a groom held his saddle-horse until the young lady should appear, and he himself stood at the head of the thoroughbred. As Johnnyboy, leaning against the railing, was regarding the turnout with ill-concealed disdain, Jack, in the pride of his triumph over his rivals, good-humoredly offered to put him in the buggy, and allow him to take the reins. Johnnyboy did not reply.

      “Come along!” continued Jack, “it will do you a heap of good! It’s better than lazing there like a girl! Rouse up, old man!”

      “Me don’t like that geegee,” said Johnnyboy calmly. “He’s a silly fool.”

      “You’re afraid,” said Jack.

      Johnnyboy lifted his proud lashes, and toddled to the steps. Jack received him in his arms, swung him into the seat, and placed the slim yellow reins in his baby hands.

      “Now you feel like a man, and not like a girl!” said Jack. “Eh, what? Oh, I beg your pardon.”

      For Miss Circe had appeared—had absolutely been obliged to wait a whole half-minute unobserved—and now stood there a dazzling but pouting apparition. In eagerly turning to receive her, Jack’s foot slipped on the step, and he fell. The thoroughbred started, gave a sickening plunge forward, and was off! But so, too, was Jack, the next moment, on his own horse, and before Miss Circe’s screams had died away.

      For two blocks on Ocean Avenue, passersby that afternoon saw a strange vision. A galloping horse careering before a light buggy, in which a small child, seated upright, was grasping the tightened reins. But so erect and composed was the little face and figure—albeit as white as its own frock—that for an instant they did not grasp its awful significance. Those further along, however, read the whole awful story in the drawn face and blazing eyes of Jack Bracy as he, at last, swung into the Avenue. For Jack had the brains as well as the nerve of your true hero, and, knowing the dangerous stimulus of a stern chase to a frightened horse, had kept a side road until it branched into the Avenue. So furious had been his pace, and so correct his calculation, that he ranged alongside of the runaway even as it passed, grasped the reins, and, in half a block, pulled up on even wheels.

      “I never saw such pluck in a mite like that,” he whispered afterwards to his anxious auditory. “He never dropped those ribbons, by G—, until I got alongside, and then he just hopped down and said, as short and cool as you please, ‘Dank you!’”

      “Me didn’t,” uttered a small voice reproachfully.

      “Didn’t you, dear! What DID you say then, darling?” exclaimed a sympathizing chorus.

      “Me said: ‘Damn you!’ Me don’t like silly fool geegees. Silly fool geegees make me sick—silly fool geegees do!”

      Nevertheless, in spite of this incident, the attempts at Johnnyboy’s physical reformation still went on. More than that, it was argued by some complacent casuists that the pluck displayed by the child was the actual result of this somewhat heroic method of taking exercise, and NOT an inherent manliness distinct from his physical tastes. So he was made to run when he didn’t want to—to dance when he frankly loathed his partners—to play at games that he despised. His books and pictures were taken away; he was hurried past hoardings

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