“No? Well, Fred must train himself, and you must feed him with motives. Run over with him what we have been saying about attention. Let him know how the land lies; that you cannot help him, but that if he wants to make a man of himself he must make himself attend and remember. Tell him it will be a stand-up fight, for this habit is contrary to nature. He will like that; ’tis boy nature to show fight, and the bigger and blacker you make the other side, the more will he like to pitch in. When I was a boy I had to fight this very battle for myself, and I’ll tell you what I did. I stuck up a card every week, divided down the middle. One side was for ‘Remembers’; the other side for ‘Forgets.’ I took myself to task every night—the very effort was a help—and put a stroke for every ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ of the day. I scored for every ‘Remember,’ and ‘t’other fellow’ for every ‘Forget.’ You don’t know how exciting it got. If by Thursday I had thirty-three ‘Remembers’ and he thirty-six ‘Forgets’ it behoved me to look alive; it was not only that ‘Forget’ might win the game, which was up on Saturday night, but unless ‘Remember’ scored ten in advance, the game was ‘drawn’—hardly a remove from lost.”
“That’s delicious! But, I wish, doctor, you would speak to Fred yourself. A word from you would go a long way.”
“I’ll look out for a chance, but an outsider cannot do much; everything rests with the boy himself, and his parents.”
CHAPTER VIII
POOR MRS. JUMEAU!
“Now, young people, when I go out, let there be no noise in the house; your mother is ill, so let her little folk be thoughtful for her!”
“Oh, is mother sick again?” said little Ned with falling countenance.
“Poor Neddie! he doesn’t like mother to be ill. We all have to be so quiet, and, then, there’s nowhere to be! It isn’t like home when mother isn’t about.”
“Mary is right,” chimed in Charlie, the eldest of the family; “if I were big enough, I should run away and go to sea, mother’s so often bad! But, father, isn’t it funny? Yesterday she was quite well, and doing all sorts of horrid things, helping the maids to clear out cupboards; and now, I dare say, she is too ill to move or speak, and to-morrow, perhaps, she’ll be our jolly mother again, able to go shrimping with us, or anything else.”
“That’s because your dear mother has no self, Charlie, boy; no sooner does she feel a bit better than she does more than she can for us all, and then she is knocked up again. I wish we could teach her to be selfish, for our sakes as well as hers, for to have her with us is better than anything she can do for us; eh, Charlie?”