“I don’t want you to try again,” rejoined Mrs Marston; “and you must not try again without a good reason. Why did you fight him yesterday?”
“Because he told a lie,” said the object promptly, swelling out again, and looking big under the impression that the goodness of its reason could not be questioned. It was, therefore, with a look of baffled surprise that it collapsed again on being told that that was not a sufficient reason for engaging in warfare, and that it was wrong to take the law into its own hands, or to put in its word or its little fist, where it had no right to interfere—and a great deal more to that effect.
“But, March, my boy,” said Mrs Marston, drawing the object towards her and patting its round little fair head, “what makes you so fond of fighting?”
“I ain’t fond o’ fighting, mother, but I can’t help it.”
“Can’t help it! Do you ever try?”
“I—I—no, I don’t think that I do. But I feel so funny when I see Bill Summers cheatin’ at play. I feel all over red-hot—like—oh! you’ve seen the big pot boilin’ over? Well, I just feel like that. An’ w’en it boils over, you know, mother, it must be took off the fire, else it kicks up sich a row! But there’s nobody to take me off the fire when I’m boilin’ over, an’ there’s no fire to take me off—so you see I can’t help it. Can I?”
As the object concluded these precociously philosophical remarks, it looked up in its mother’s face with an earnest inquiring gaze. The mother looked down at it with an equally earnest look—though there was a twinkle in each eye and a small dimple in each cheek that indicated a struggle with gravity—and said—
“I could stop the big pot from boiling-over without taking it off the fire.”
“How?” inquired Two-feet-ten eagerly.
“By letting it boil over till it put the fire out.”