I've been keeping Terry under my eye, and I don't believe he's a trouble-maker. His first move was to lift Babe out of the cradle, hold him up and publicly announce that he was a darlin'. Then he pointed out to me what a wonderful head the child had, feeling his frontal bone and declaring he was sure to make a great scholar in his time. Dinky-Dunk, grinning at the sober way in which I was swallowing this, pointedly inquired of Terry whether it was Milton or Archimedes that Babe most resembled as to skull formation. But it isn't Terry's blarney that has made me capitulate; it's the fact that he has proved so companionable and has slipped so quietly into his place in our little lonely circle of lives on this ragged edge of nowhere.
And he's as clean as a cat, shaving every blessed morning with a little old broken-handled razor which he strops on a strip of oiled bootleg. He declares that razor to be the finest bit of steel in all the Americas, and showed off before Olie and Olga yesterday morning by shaving without a looking-glass, which trick he said he learned in the army. He also gave Olie a hair-cut, which was badly needed, and on Sunday has promised to rig up a soldering-iron and mend all my pans for me. He looks little over twenty, but is really thirty and more, and has been in India and Mexico and Alaska.
I caught him neatly darning his own woolen socks. Instead of betraying shame at being detected in that effeminate pastime he proudly explained that he'd learned to do a bit of stitching in the army. He hasn't many possessions, but he's very neat in his arrangement of them. A good soldier, he solemnly told me, always had to be a bit of an old maid. "And you were a grand soldier, Terry, I know," I frankly told him. "I've done a bit av killing in me time!" he proudly acknowledged. But as he sat there darning his sock-heel he looked as though he couldn't kill a field mouse. And in his idle hours he reads Nick Carter, a series of paper-bound detective stories, almost worn to tatters, which he is going through for the second or third time. These adventures, I find, he later recounts to Olie, who is slowly but surely succumbing to the poison of the penny-dreadful and the virus of the shilling-shocker! I even caught Dinky-Dunk sitting up over one of these blood-curdling romances the other night, though he laughed a little as I dragged him off to bed, at the absurdity of the situations. Terry's eyes lighted up when he saw my books and magazines. When I told him he could take anything he wanted, he beamed and said it would sure be a glorious winter he'd be having, with all that book-reading when the long nights came. But before those long nights are over I'm going to try to pilot Terry into the channels of respectable literature.
