Free Dear Enemy by Jean Webster Page A

and the most beautiful brown eyes that ever came out of Naples. After the father was stabbed in a fight and the mother had died of alcoholism, the poor little chap by some chance or other got to us. I suspect that he belongs in the Catholic Protectory. As for his manners--oh dear! oh dear! They are what you would expect. He kicks and bites and swears. I have dubbed him Punch.
    Yesterday he was brought squirming and howling to my office, charged with having knocked down a little girl and robbed her of her doll. Miss Snaith plumped him into a chair behind me, and left him to grow quiet, while I went on with my writing. I was suddenly startled by an awful crash. He had pushed that big green jardiniere off the window-sill and broken it into five hundred pieces. I jumped with a suddenness that swept the ink- bottle to the floor, and when Punch saw that second catastrophe, he stopped roaring with rage and threw back his head and roared with laughter. The child is DIABOLICAL.
    I have determined to try a new method of discipline that I don't believe in the whole of his forlorn little life he has ever experienced. I am going to see what praise and encouragement and love will do. So, instead of scolding him about the jardiniere, I assumed that it was an accident. I kissed him and told him not to feel bad; that I didn't mind in the least. It shocked him into being quiet; he simply held his breath and stared while I wiped away his tears and sopped up the ink.
    The child just now is the biggest problem that the J. G. H. affords. He needs the most patient, loving, individual care--a proper mother and father, likewise some brothers and sisters and a grandmother. But I can't place him in a respectable family until I make over his language and his propensity to break things. I separated him from the other children, and kept him in my room all the morning, Jane having removed to safe heights all destructible OBJETS D'ART. Fortunately, he loves to draw, and he sat on a rug for two hours, and occupied himself with colored pencils. He was so surprised when I showed an interest in a red- and-green ferryboat, with a yellow flag floating from the mast, that he became quite profanely affable. Until then I couldn't get a word out of him.
    In the afternoon Dr. MacRae dropped in and admired the ferryboat, while Punch swelled with the pride of creation. Then, as a reward for being such a good little boy, the doctor took him out in his automobile on a visit to a country patient.
    Punch was restored to the fold at five o'clock by a sadder and wiser doctor. At a sedate country estate he had stoned the chickens, smashed a cold frame, and swung the pet Angora cat by its tail. Then when the sweet old lady tried to make him be kind to poor pussy, he told her to go to hell.
    I can't bear to consider what some of these children have seen and experienced. It will take years of sunshine and happiness and love to eradicate the dreadful memories that they have stored up in the far-back corners of their little brains. And there are so many children and so few of us that we can't hug them enough; we simply haven't arms or laps to go around.
    MAIS PARLONS D'AUTRES CHOSES! Those awful questions of heredity and environment that the doctor broods over so constantly are getting into my blood, too; and it's a vicious habit. If a person is to be of any use in a place like this, she must see nothing but good in the world. Optimism is the only wear for a social worker.
    "'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock"--do you know where that beautiful line of poetry comes from? "Cristabel," of English K. Mercy! how I hated that course! You, being an English shark, liked it; but I never understood a word that was said from the time I entered the classroom till I left it. However, the remark with which I opened this paragraph is true. It IS the middle of night by the mantelpiece clock, so I'll wish you pleasant dreams. ADDIO!
    SALLIE.
    Tuesday.
    Dear Enemy:
    You doctored the whole