Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/91



Twenty times in the course of the first week I essayed to discharge the boy, but on each occasion he missed firing. He was so cheerful, so beamingly unconscious of his own short- comings, that it was impossible to get beyond a certain point of severity. He reminded me of a fox-terrier pup, once of my acquaintance, who always imagined that an infuriated attempt to get at him with a stick and beat him to a pulp was part of some new game. After a short detour he would come romping back in an ecstasy, smiling and wagging his rudiment of a tail, and the man who could have found it in his heart to strike him thus I should have suspected of being able to parboil a babe-in-arms without a qualm. So with Darius. I felt that if ever, when maddened by the mouth-organ, I could creep upon him from behind, I might discharge him. But if he turned upon me, before the odious deed was done, all smiles, all eagerness to please, I knew that I was lost.