The Idiot at Home

"But you would have a manager for all this," suggested Mrs. Pedagog.

"That's the point," observed the Idiot. "We'd have to have a manager, and for my part I shouldn't relish being managed. What chance would Mrs. Idiot have against a manager ahead of an army of servants of such magnitude? We have more than we can keep in subjection as we stand now, with this one small house. If it wasn't for Mary, who keeps an eye on things, I don't know what we should do."

"Well, I am glad you're rich, pa," said Tommy; "you can increase my allowance."

"And I can have a pony," lisped Mollie.

"Alas! Poor children!" cried the Idiot. "That is the saddest part of wealth. Instead of bringing the little ones up ourselves, to be wholly fashionable it will be necessary to sublet the contract to a committee of tutors and governesses. The obligations of social life hereafter will require that we meet our children by appointment only, and that when they dine they shall eat in solitary grandeur until they become so polished in manners that their parents may once more formally welcome them at table. All the good old democratic ways of the domestic republic are now to be set aside. Tommy, instead of yelling for a buckwheat-cake at the top of his lungs, upon our return will request a butler in choicest French to hand him a pâté de foie gras; and dear little Mollie will have to give up attracting the waitress' attention by shying an olive-pit at her and imperiously summon her by means of an electric buzzer set to buzzing with her toe."

"Mercy! What a picture of woe!" cried Mr. Pedagog.

"Not altogether true, is it?" suggested the Doctor.

"Have you ever visited Newport?" asked the Idiot.

"No," said the Doctor, "never."

"Well, don't," said the Idiot, "unless you wish to look upon that picture – a picture of life whence childhood is abolished; where blasé little swells take the place of lively small boys, and diminutive grand duchesses, clad in regal garb, have supplanted the little daughters who bring smiles and sunshine into the life of the common people. Ah, my friends," the Idiot continued, with a shake of his head, "there are sad sights to be seen in this world, but I know of none sadder than those rich little scions of the American aristocracy in whose veins the good red blood of a not very remote ancestry has turned blue through too much high living and too little real living."

"I should think you'd take that hundred and forty thousand dollars and throw it into the sea," said Mr. Brief.

"That would be wicked waste," observed the Idiot. "I propose to use it to win back the good old home-life, and the best way to perpetuate that is to leave it for a time and travel. When you have travelled and seen how uncomfortable others are, and discovered how uncomfortable you are while travelling, nothing can exceed the bliss of getting back to the first simple principles of the real home."

"As a sensible man, why don't you stay here, then?" queried the Poet.

"Because," said the Idiot, "if I stayed here with that hundred and forty thousand dollars on my mind I should nurse it, and in a short while I'd become a millionaire, and such a misfortune as that I shall never invite. We shall go abroad and spend – "

"Not all of it, I hope?" said Mr. Whitechoker.

"No," replied the Idiot. "But enough of it to mitigate the horrors of our condition while absent."

And so it was that Castle Idiot was closed, and that for a time at least "The Idiot at Home" became a thing of the past. Wherever he and his small family may be, may I not bespeak for him the kindly, even affectionate, esteem of those who have followed him with me through these pages? He has his faults; they are many and manifest, for he has never shown the slightest disposition to conceal them, but, as Mrs. Pedagog remarked to me the other night, "He has a large heart, and it is in the right place. If he only wouldn't talk so much!"

THE END