My predecessors in the patriarchal profession were a reticent lot, inherited no doubt from our original ancestor Adam, who could never be got to talk even to members of his immediate family on the subject of his early years.

True, it is generally believed that he had no early years, and that he was born on his fifty-ninth birthday, but even as to that he would not speak.

I shall never forget the look on his face when I asked him at a Thanksgiving dinner one year if he had ever been a monkey with a tail.

He rose up from the table with considerable dignity, and leading me out into the wood-shed turned me over on his knee and subjected me to a rather severe course of treatment with a hair-brush.
"There, my lad," he observed when he had done.

"If I had had a tail that is about where I should have worn it." I never referred to the subject again..