These two wild children had much in common.  They loved to ramble together, to build huts, to climb trees for nests, to ride the colts, to dance, to race, and to play at boys’ rude games as if both were boys.  But wherever two natures have a great deal in common, the conditions of a first-rate quarrel are furnished ready-made.  Relations are very apt to hate each other just because they are too much alike.  It is so frightful to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech, all the failings of temper, intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined with mirrors!  Nature knows what she is about.  The centrifugal principle which grows out of the antipathy of like to like is only the repetition in character of the arrangement we see expressed materially in certain seed-capsules, which burst and throw the seed to all points of the compass.  A house is a large pod with a human germ or two in each of its cells or chambers; it opens by dehiscence of the front-door by and by, and projects one of its germs to Kansas, another to San Francisco, another to Chicago, and so on; and this that Smith may not be Smithed to death and Brown may not be Browned into a mad-house, but mix in with the world again and struggle back to average humanity.

Elsie’s father, whose fault was to indulge her in everything, found that it would never do to let these children grow up together.  They would either love each other as they got older, and pair like wild creatures, or take some fierce antipathy, which might end nobody could tell where.  It was not safe to try.  The boy must be sent away.  A sharper quarrel than common decided this point.  Master Dick forgot Old Sophy’s caution, and vexed the girl into a paroxysm of wrath, in which she sprang at him and bit his arm.  Perhaps they made too much of it; for they sent for the old Doctor, who came at once when he heard what had happened.  He had a good deal to say about the danger there was from the teeth of animals or human beings when enraged; and as he emphasized his remarks by the application of a pencil of lunar caustic to each of the marks left by the sharp white teeth, they were like to be remembered by at least one of his hearers.

So Master Dick went off on his travels, which led him into strange places and stranger company.  Elsie was half pleased and half sorry to have him go; the children had a kind of mingled liking and hate for each other, just such as is very common among relations.  Whether the girl had most satisfaction in the plays they shared, or in teasing him, or taking her small revenge upon him for teasing her, it would have been hard to say.  At any rate, she was lonely without him.  She had more fondness for the old black woman than anybody; but Sophy could not follow her far beyond her own old rocking-chair.  As