“Now you be careful, John Franks!” said his wife. “Any more falls like that last one, cushion on the floor or no, an’ I’ll faint dead away.

The display may have seemed unremarkable to one in the habit of seeing such things. But to Hester it was positively astonishing at what each was capable of. As to the mother’s anxiety over hard falls and broken bones, there hardly seemed any bones in the boys to break. Gelatine, at best, seemed to be what was inside their muscles, so wonderful were their feats and their pranks so strange. Amidst the marvels of their performance—broken by an occasional exclamation, followed by injunction to care from the doctor—in which their agile bodies responded to their wills, the occasional appearance of a strangely mingled touch of pathos chiefly interested Hester.

After some twenty or thirty minutes, the master of ceremonies suddenly drew himself up, wiped his forehead, then gave a deep sigh, as much as to say, “I have done my best, and if I have not pleased you, the more is my loss, for I have tried hard.” The performance was over.

The doctor rose, and in a manly voice proceeded to point out to Franks one or two precautions which his knowledge of anatomy enabled him to suggest, especially regarding the training of the youngest. At the same time, he expressed himself greatly pleased with what his host had been so kind to show him.

“It mayn’t be the best o’ livin’s for a family man,” Franks replied, almost apologetically. “But at least I managed to keep life in the kids. It wasn’t much more, you see, but life’s life, though it be not tip-top style. An’ if they’re none o’ them doin’ just so well as they might, there’s none o’ them in trouble with the magistrate yet. An’ that’s a comfort as long as it lasts. An’ when folk tell me I’m doin’ no good, an’ my trade’s o’ no use to nobody, I says to them, ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir, or ma’am, but do you call it nothin’ to fill four hungry bellies at home afore I was fifteen, after my mother and father died?’ After that, they ain’t in general said nothin’. An’ one gentleman, watching me once perform on the street, he gave me half a crown.”

“That was the best possible answer you could have given, Franks,” rejoined Mr. Christopher. “But I think perhaps you hardly understood what such objectors meant to say. They might have gone on to explain, only they hadn’t the heart after what you told them, that most trades did something on both sides. The trade not only fed the little ones at home, but did good to the persons for whom the work was done. The man, for instance, who cobbles shoes gives a pair of dry feet to some old man at the same time that he filled his own child’s hungry little stomach.”

Franks was silent for a moment, thinking.