“We’ve got to have more law and order,” pursued the tramp. “The mothers have got to make their little ones eat their mush, or porridge, as they say over the line in Canada—not fling it out the window to the dogs. I tell you that’s where it begins, just where every good and bad thing begins—in the cradle. The average mother has too much respect for the squallings of her Young America.[212] Let her spank him once in awhile, and keep him out of sight of the eagle.”
“Do you suppose,” said Bonny, solemnly, “that if you had been well spanked you would not be lying here ?”
“Suppose,” repeated the tramp, leaning back, “I don’t suppose anything about it. I know it. If my mother and father had made me mind them, and kept me in nights, and trained me into decent, self-respecting manhood, I’d be standing beside you to-night, young sirs, beside you—beyond you—for I guess from your bearing you are only young men of average ability, and I tell you I was a power, when I’d study and let the drink alone.”
“You must have had a strange mother,” remarked Bonny.
The tramp suddenly raised himself again, and his sunburnt face grew redder. “For the love of Heaven,” he said, extending one ragged arm, “don’t say a word against her. The thought of her is the only thing that moves me. She loved me, and, unclean, characterless wretch that I am, she would love me yet if she were still alive.”
The man’s head sank on his arm, but not quickly enough. Tom and Bonny had both seen glistening in his eyes, not the one jewel they were jestingly[213] in search of, but two priceless jewels that were not pearls, but diamonds.
“Come on, Bonny,” said Tom, roughly, as he drew him from the shed.
“Tom,” remarked Bonny, softly, as they went slowly up-stairs, On one of the loveliest of autumn mornings, the united in the holy bonds of matrimony to the somewhat mature bridegroom, and now, in the old family mansion of the Everests, they were receiving the congratulations of their numerous friends. Selina had had a church wedding. That she insisted on, greatly to the distress and confusion of her modest husband. He had walked up the aisle of the church as if to his hanging. One minute he went from red to purple, from purple to violent perspiration, the next he became as if wrapped in an ice-cold sheet, and not until then could he recover himself vacation rentals.