voice was low and gentle, his gestures were delicate, his views on life, the world, religion and politics, the mildest.  A kind word melted him.  A plea won him.  He gave to all local charities, and was gravely depressed for a week when the Titanic went down.  And yet—­the men in the trained-animal game acknowledged him the nerviest and most nerveless of the profession.  And yet—­his greatest fear in the world was that his large, stout wife, at table, should crown him with a plate of hot soup.  Twice, in a tantrum, she had done this during their earlier married life.  In addition to his fear that she might do it again, he loved her sincerely and devotedly, as he loved his children, seven of them, for whom nothing was too good or too expensive.

So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he forbade from seeing him work, and planned gentler careers for them.  John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to become a man of letters, and, in the meantime, ran his own automobile with the corresponding standard of living such ownership connoted in the college town of New Haven.  Harold and Frederick were down at a millionaires’ sons’ academy in Pennsylvania; and Clarence, the youngest, at a prep. school in Massachusetts, was divided in his choice of career between becoming a doctor or an aviator.  The three girls, two of them twins, were pledged to be cultured into ladies.  Elsie was on the verge of graduating from Vassar.  Mary and Madeline, the twins, in the most select and most expensive of seminaries, were preparing for Vassar.  All of which required money which Harris Collins did not grudge, but which strained the earning capacity of his animal-training school.  It compelled him to work the harder, although his wife and the four sons and three daughters did not dream that he actually worked at all.  Their idea was that by virtue of superior wisdom he merely superintended, and they would have been terribly shocked could they have seen him, club in hand, thrashing forty mongrel dogs, in the process of training, which had become excited and out of hand.

A great deal of the work was done by his assistants, but it was Harris Collins who taught them continually what to do and how to do it, and who himself, on more important animals, did the work and showed them how.  His assistants were almost invariably youths from the reform schools, and he picked them with skilful eye and intuition.  Control of them, under their paroles, with intelligence and coldness on their part, were the conditions and qualities he sought, and such combination, as a matter of course, carried with it cruelty.  Hot blood, generous impulses, sentimentality, were qualities he did not want for his business; and the Cedarwild Animal School was business from the first tick of the clock to the last bite of the lash.  In short, Harris Collins, in the totality of results, was guilty of causing more misery and pain to animals than all laboratories of vivisection in Christendom.