hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in the family.  Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant servitors of mine.  If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your hand.  Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an exactly similar gift to all my children—­and knowing by experience the importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself that you did it, and did it thoroughly.  Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle—­a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty or ninety children in your house.  But the deed was done—­the man escaped.  I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance.  I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains.  But they never caught him.  I am not cruel, sir—­I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged—­but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.  By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assail!) there was never anything on this earth like it!  I knew who gave the whistle to the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me.  They believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection could have foreseen:  I had to order a hundred and ten whistles—­I think we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are off at college now—­I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn’t have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got tired of the whistles.  And if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than Haman!  That is the word with the bark on it!  Shade of Nephi!  You don’t know anything about married life.  I am rich, and everybody knows it.  I am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it.  I have a strong fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me.

“Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands.  Why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and she my wife—­that I had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could not remember her name.  Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me—­a