Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/129



HIS real name was Hugh Edward Hummerley, but they called him Tiddlywinks for short.

As the son of an English major who once had fought real battles in India, and who now built the biggest bridges and the deepest canals in all the world, Tiddlywinks took life very seriously. Eighteen years in the Service had given Tiddlywinks' papa very deep-rooted ideas on the value of discipline, and people pitied Tiddlywinks, as a rule, and said that his father was too strict with the child. But then people did n't understand. He might have been just a little afraid of his papa at times, knowing that his spoken word was Law, but for all that the child loved him with a love that was unutterable in its depth.

So when Major Hummerley started away 117