“No,” I says; “and I never let on to you that he’s got a mole on his chin either.  What of that?”

Then the poor lollop tries to tell me what of it.  I saw he really had been under a nervous strain, all right.  Suffering had put its hot iron on him.  First, he just naturally loathed children anyway.  Hadn’t he run away from a good home in Iowa when he was sixteen, account of being the oldest of seven?  He said some things in general about children that would of got him no applause at a mothers’ meeting.  He was simply afraid to look a child in the eye; and, from what he’d like to do to ’em all, it seemed like his real middle name was Molech.  Wasn’t that the party with hostile views about children?  Anyway, you could see that Homer’s idea of a real swell festivity would be to hide out by an orphan asylum some night until the little ones had said their prayers and was tucked all peaceful into their trundle beds and then set fire to the edifice in eight places after disconnecting the fire alarm.  That was Homer, and he was honest; he just couldn’t help it.

And Bert’s tikes had drove him mad with their playful antics.  He said he’d be set down for a bite of dinner and one of ’em would climb up his back and feel his hair—­not saying a word, just taking hold of it; then it would jump down and another would climb up and do the same thing, and him not daring to defend himself.  He’d got so worked up he was afraid to stay on the place.

“And you know,” he says—­“what I can’t understand—­danged if Bert don’t seem to kind of like ’em.  You may think I’m a liar, but he waited for one the other morning when it squealed at him and kept a hold of its hand clean down to the hay barn.  What do you think of that?  And besides these that go round infesting the place outside he’s got a short yearling and a long two-year-old that have to be night-herded.  I listened to ’em every night.  One yelled and strangled all last night, till I s’posed, of course, it was going to perish everlastingly; but here this morning it was acting like nothing at all had happened.

“All I can say is, Bert don’t have much luck.  And that littlest yeller always unswallowing its meals with no effort whatever!  It’s horrible!  And the mother, with no strength of character—­feeble-minded, I reckon—­coddles ’em!  She never did cuss ’em out proper or act human toward ’em.  Kids like them, what they need—­upside down and three quick hard ones.  I know!”

I was fool enough to argue with him a bit, trying to see if he didn’t have a lick of sense.  I told him to look how happy Bert was; and how his family had made a man of him, him getting more money and saving more than ever in his past life.  Homer said what good would all that money do him?  He’d only fool it away on his wife and children.

“He regrets it, all right,” says Homer.  “I says to myself the other day:  ‘I bet a cookie he’d like to be carefree and happy like me!’”