children! How he had tormented her pets! He would sit for hours poking a pencil into the canary cage, laughing to see the bird's fluttering attempts to escape. When he was a little boy, afraid to tease the cat, he caught flies and pulled off their legs, one by one.
When Pete was a little boy he had often watched his mother make her nightly pilgrimage through his father's pockets in search of stray coins. It was a jolly game to Pete, this search, and once when they were caught, and his father called them dirty sneak-thieves, he knew his father was just a rotten, stingy old man, and that he would never like him.
Up to fourteen Pete had run away from school so often that his father decided to let him go to work. He tried to get him a job in the plumbing shop, but the boss had heard of Pete's dishonesty and refused to employ him. He tried selling papers, but he was so clumsy, overgrown, and lazy that the other boys outran him and often at the end of the evening he found that he had lost money on the day's investment. At eighteen Pete ran away from home and joined the navy. His father was content because he was sure that the men would pound some of the cussedness out of him, but his mother's heart was broken. For two years his mother cried and prayed, and prayed and cried. Then he returned to them—unchanged. And she lived in a perpetual torment that he would leave again.
Minnie's younger brother, Jimmy, had a disposition very much like her own—happy-go-lucky. He let the years pass by without any serious regard for the future. He and Minnie measured their success by the laughs they could crowd into each day. They awoke in the morning singing, went to work
