“Why certainly I do,” returned the Idiot, calmly.  “It’s my place to make the old folks happy if I can; and if thinking me nineteen different kinds of a genius is going to fill my mother’s heart with happiness, I’m going to let her think it.  What’s the use of destroying other people’s idols even if we do know them to be hollow mockeries?  Do you think you do a praiseworthy act, for instance, when you kick over the heathen’s stone gods and leave him without any at all?  You may not have noticed it, but I have—­that it is easier to pull down an idol than it is to rear an ideal.  I have had idols shattered myself, and I haven’t found that the pedestals they used to occupy have been rented since.  They are there yet and empty—­standing as monuments to what once seemed good to me—­and I’m no happier nor no better for being disillusioned.  So it is with my mother.  I let her go on and think me perfect.  It does her good, and it does me good because it makes me try to live up to that idea of hers as to what I am.  If she had the same opinion of me that we all have she’d be the most miserable woman in the world.”

“We don’t all think so badly of you,” said the Doctor, rather softened by the Idiot’s remarks.

“No,” put in the Bibliomaniac.  “You are all right.  You breathe normally, and you have nice blue eyes.  You are graceful and pleasant to look upon, and if you’d been born dumb we’d esteem you very highly.  It is only your manners and your theories that we don’t like; but even in these we are disposed to believe that you are a well-meaning child.”

“That is precisely the way to put it,” assented the School-master.  “You are harmless even when most annoying.  For my own part, I think the most objectionable feature about you is that you suffer from that unfortunately not uncommon malady, extreme youth.  You are young for your age, and if you only wouldn’t talk, I think we should get on famously together.”

“You overwhelm me with your compliments,” said the Idiot.  “I am sorry I am so young, but I cannot be brought to believe that that is my own fault.  One must live to attain age, and how the deuce can one live when one boards?”

As no one ventured to reply to this question, the force of which very evidently, however, was fully appreciated by Mrs. Smithers, the Idiot continued: 

[Illustration:  “‘I THOUGHT MY FATHER A MEAN-SPIRITED ASSASSIN’”]

“Youth is thrust upon us in our infancy, and must be endured until such a time as Fate permits us to account ourselves cured.  It swoops down upon us when we have neither the strength nor the brains to resent it.  Of course there are some superior persons in this world who never were young.  Mr. Pedagog, I doubt not, was ushered into this world with all three sets of teeth cut, and not wailing as most infants are, but discussing the most abstruse philosophical problems.  His fairy stories were told him, if ever, in words of ten syllables; and his father’s