“What’s the matter with you, son?” demanded the old man. “You look and act as glum as bill day. Have things been going wrong? You said something about not being popular with Joe.”
“Oh, that?” said Jimmie, eagerly seizing the chance of escape. “That’s so. It’s nothing much. I was reading in the Herald this morning how Professor Garfield up at Hiram College is raising a regiment of college fellers. And I told father that when a man gets to be pretty near fifteen it’s time he was thinking of joining some such regiment as that. He talked to me more than ten minutes without stopping. And then mother took a turn at talking.
“They didn’t leave very much of me. They said I’m ungrateful and lazy and undisciplined and a lot of other things. But I wouldn’t have minded all that so much, only—”
“Only what?”
“Nothing.”
“Only they said,” supplemented Dad, “that it was I who put those notions into your head by my gas-bag yarns about the Mexican war and the way I feel about what a man owes as a duty to his country.”
“Did father tell you all that?” asked the boy quickly. “How mean of him!”
“I’ve heard it before,” evaded Dad. “And the worst of it is, it’s true.”
“It isn’t!” vehemently denied Jimmie.
“Yes, it is, son. Not that my ideas about patriotism aren’t all right. And a man who has risked his life is sure entitled to tell about those risks. But I had no right to fill your mind with ideas of war when you ought to be thinking about ciphering and grammar and—”