silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head. "No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart."

Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived and grew fat.

Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months, without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the floor.

Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!"

Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it."

Steven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the evening Happy Clown.

The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed: the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere. He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers to buy, and 

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