Young Stanford stared for a moment at his neighbour, then he threw back his head and chuckled.
"I beg your pardon, Brewster," he exclaimed; "but it struck me as being—er—a decidedly original idea, that of establishing a children's court in your own home. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brewster's notion; Marian tells me she's very—er—advanced, when it comes to disciplining the children."
Sam Brewster's blue eyes rested steadily upon his neighbour.
"Singular as the statement may sound, I'm prepared to say that I'm somewhat interested in my children's upbringing on my own account," he said coolly. "My wife has notions, as you call them, and one of them is that a father has quite as much responsibility in the training of the children as the mother. I believe she's right."
"Well, I can't see it that way," drawled Stanford. "I'm perfectly willing to leave the kids to Marian while they're small; when they're too big for her to handle I'll take 'em in hand. They'll obey me, you'd better believe, from the word go. I think as my father did, that a child ought to mind as though he were fired out of a gun."
"It seems to me a child is a reasonable being, and has a reasoning being's right to understand something of the whys and wherefores of his obedience," protested Sam, vaguely aware that he was quoting the opinions of someone else. "Besides that, don't they tell us a child's character is pretty well formed by the time he is seven?"
"Bosh!" exploded Stanford. "I wouldn't give a brass nickel for all the theories you can bundle together. There were no sort of explanations or mollycoddling coming to me, when I was a kid. It was 'do this, sir'; or 'don't do the other.' I can tell you, I walked a chalk-line till I was sixteen. Why, gracious! if I'd attempted to argue and talk back to my governor the way your boy talks to you—you needn't deny it, for I've heard him myself—I'd have stood up to eat for a week. I've done it more than once for simply looking cross-eyed, and I can tell you it did me good."
Sam Brewster eyed his companion with grave interest; there was no animosity in his tone and merely a friendly interest in his face as he inquired:
"You walked a chalk-line till you were sixteen, you say; what did you do then?"
Young Stanford's handsome dark face reddened slightly.