Mrs. Nolan shrugged. "Well—I'm glad none of my children are freaks, anyhow."

"I'll get your sugar."

In the afternoon the minister called. He talked of the church and the town until he felt his preamble adequate. "I was wondering why you didn't bring your child to be baptized, Mrs. Danner. And why you couldn't come to church, now that it is old enough?"

"Well," she replied carefully, "the child is rather—irritable. And we thought we'd prefer to have it baptized at home."

"It's irregular."

"We'd prefer it."

"Very well. I'm afraid—" he smiled—"that you're a little—ah—unfamiliar with the upbringing of children. Natural—in the case of the first-born. Quite natural. But—ah—I met Mrs. Nolan to-day. Quite by accident. And she said that you kept the child—ah—in an iron pen. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to me—"

"Did it?" Mrs. Danner's jaw set squarely.

But the minister was not to be turned aside lightly. "I'm afraid, if it's true, that we—the church—will have to do something about it. You can't let the little fellow grow up surrounded by iron walls. It will surely point him toward the prison. Little minds are tender and—ah—impressionable."

"We've had a crib and two pens of wood," Mrs. Danner answered tartly. "He smashed them all."

"Ah? So?" Lifted eyebrows. "Temper, eh? He should be punished. Punishment is the only mould for unruly children."

"You'd punish a six-months-old baby?"

"Why—certainly. I've reared seven by the rod."

"Well—" a blazing maternal instinct made her feel vicious. "Well—you won't raise mine by a rod. Or touch it—by a mile. Here's your hat, parson." Mrs. Danner spent the next hour in prayer.

The village is known for the speed of its gossip and the sloth of its intelligence. Those two factors explain the conditions which preluded and surrounded the dawn of consciousness in young Hugo. Mrs. Danner's extemporaneous fabrication of a sturdy ancestral line kept the more supernatural elements of the baby's prowess from the public eye. It became rapidly and generally understood that the Danner infant was abnormal and that the treatment to which it was 

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