“I send you these books, they may help you—to me they seemed cruelly hard to follow. And I send you my own notes of the boys’ characters. I know quite well this is not a small thing I am asking, but what can I do? Five little boys, the bitter world, and no woman. Forgive me, and help me thus, when I am past all other helping.”
[173]
]Oh, the books! Human Buds, of course, and all its marvellous maxims and rules; Souls and Minds of Children; and Our Responsibilities to the Young.
But the red note-book was the most pitiful. Such laboured notes, such anxious writing down of smallest detail of each lad’s behaviour.
Even Richie’s four-year-old sinfulness was soberly expatiated upon. “Did his present greediness indicate a tendency to avarice in the future?” asked the sad pen. “Must watch carefully and pass nothing by,” it added. “Memo: deprive him of sweet things for a day—most efficacious punishment.”
And Alfie,—Alfie who at one time showed a tendency to stray from truth’s narrow path when such rending questions as “Who stole the cake?” or “Who broke the window?” were sternly put. “Alfie,” said the notes, “must be appealed to through his better nature, must be told stories of noble men and boys; Washington’s glorious tale among others.”
There was even a page headed “Little Baby.” Baby was passionate, it seemed, more so than any of the others; he hit the table angrily if he bumped his head, he screamed himself into fits if sugar was not forthcoming.
“If not checked, might not such anger lead him,” said the frightened notes, “some day to some dreadful crime?”
After this, the last note in the book, there were [174] ]blots that tears might have caused, or a pen let fall despairingly.
Phyl and Dolly coming in to ask had not Richie and Alf better be kept for tea, found their mother sobbing over the pitiful strivings and gropings of that poor dead woman.