The doctor dropped the paper which had held the powder, hurried to the desk, took out the notes for his work on heredity, and made the following memorandum: "It is undeniable that the mental, like the physical nature, sometimes generates a quality utterly different from itself." Then the doctor erased this, and re-wrote and amplified it. The second form did not satisfy him entirely, so again he erased and wrote, and repeated the process several times. As he was making his sixth erasure he became conscious that Jack had lounged up to his elbow.
"Oh!" said the doctor, "you said you wanted to be punished, didn't you?"
"Yes, sir."
The doctor wanted to say "Confound it!" but he habitually refrained from such remarks before his boy; as he looked back to his doubly scrawled page, however, he unconsciously penned "Confound it!" directly after his late erasure, and he followed it with exclamation points to the end of the line.
"What do you think should be done to you?" asked the doctor, finally.
"I don't know," said Jack, "but it ought to be something dreadful, for I've been so bad."
"Why did you get drunk?"
"I didn't mean to do it," said Jack, "but that's just the way with everything I do," and Jack explained the affair with the brandy-bottle.
"You did something worse than get drunk when you took that brandy, my boy," said the doctor.
"I suppose so," said Jack; "I always do something worse. But I don't know what it was."