NO mother, through the passing of the ages, has been able to discover why bad manners are so catching and permanent, yet how you may leave your sweet-spoken, grammatical child with a surly ungrammatical one, and not even a proper word or a single "g" will rub off upon the one who needs it. It would be a lovely world if righteousness and good manners were as catching as unrighteousness and bad manners!
With each successive year Alice felt that it would be easy to educate children on a desert island, in fact her whole feeling on the matter might have been summed up in the one phrase: If it were not for their little friends—
"Why," she wailed to her husband, "can't they learn any of the good things from them?" She said this after she had announced that if another child of hers said, "Ish kabibble," well—he should see what he should see. By Alice's voice one gathered that he should see things of the most terrifying kind, and, indeed, might very well not all rest with seeing, but would be doings also—they, too, of an unpleasant nature.
"They caught it from Bobby Morris," she explained to Tom.
"You speak as if it were the chicken pox," he replied, with that misplaced facetiousness so irritating in fathers and husbands.
"Chicken pox!" cried Alice. "Chicken pox! I wish it were the chicken pox; it's not dangerous and they get over it. Chicken pox doesn't poison the well-springs
