and put in their stead a--ah--a recipe for what we called Washington pie--and a very good pie it was.""John!" ejaculated Mrs. Pedagog.

"I _did_, my dear," confessed the Schoolmaster, "and really I have never regretted it, although my particular uncle gave me a distressingly acrid and dreary lecture on my certain future when he found out what had happened. Yet what did happen, though mischievously intended, resulted in great good, for when the dear old gentleman stood up in the pulpit and started to preach the next morning, with the recipe for a Washington pie as the only available note at hand, he pulled himself together and preached off-hand the finest sermon of his life, and he discovered then the secret of his after-success. He became known ultimately as one of the most brilliant preachers of his time, and from that moment never went into the pulpit with any factitious aids to his memory."

"You mean cribs, don't you?" asked the Idiot.

"That is what college-boys call them, I believe," said Mr. Pedagog. "I will say further that a year before he died _my_ Uncle Jed told me that it was my mischievous act that had given him the hint which became the keynote of his eloquence," he added, complacently. "I shall always remember him affectionately."

"Of course," said the Idiot. "No doubt we all remember our Uncle Jeds affectionately. I certainly do. He was my mother's brother, and he meant well. I never really blamed him for not knowing how to sympathize with a boyish prank, because there has never been a school of instructions for uncles. Unclehood is about the hardest hood man has to wear, and as I have observed uncles and their habits, they either spoil or repel the small chaps and chappesses who happen to be made their nephews and nieces by an accident of birth. Uncles are either intensely genial or intensely irritable, and as far as I am concerned it is my belief that our colleges should include in their curriculum a chair of 'Uncleism.' Unclehood is a relationship that man has to accept. It is thrust upon him. He can't help himself. To be a father or a mother is a matter of volition. But even in a free country like our own, if a man has a brother or a sister he is liable to find himself an uncle at any time whether he wishes to be one or not. Then when it happens he's got to reason out a course of procedure without any basis in previous experience."

"Why don't you write a book on 'Hints to Uncles,' or 'The Complete Aunt,'" suggested Mr. Brief. "I have no doubt it would make good reading."

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