[The Autobiography of Methuselah by John Kendrick Bangs]@TWC D-Link book
The Autobiography of Methuselah

CHAPTER IV
8/13

It has been said that I did not have much to be proud of in the results of my efforts to bring up my children right, and I suppose that in the case of Cain and Abel I must admit that I have not; but I am not so sure that things would have turned out any different if I had reared them after a Fireside Companion pattern for the making of a panne velvet posterity.

I will go so far as to say that after looking over the comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life.

So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys.

In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were better than those which now exist.

I never heard of my boys running loose about town waking up the whole community with their cheers because their college football team had crippled eleven other boys from another college for life; and hard to manage as Cain and Abel were at times, Adam and I never had to put them to bed at five o'clock in the morning because they had paralyzed their throats at a college banquet announcing to an exasperated world that they were Sons of a Gambolier.


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