BUDGE AND TODDIE
OR
HELEN’S BABIES AT PLAY
[Illustration: THE MAID’S GENERAL CARE OF THE BOYS]
[Illustration: Cartoon representation of Title Page]
BUDGE & TODDIE
OR
HELEN’S BABIES
AT PLAY
Being an account
of the further doings of these
marvelously precocious children.
By JOHN HABBERTON
AUTHOR OF HELEN’S BABIES, etc., etc..
With fifty illustrations by TOD DWIGGINS
GROSSET AND DUNLAP
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
GROSSET & DUNLAP
_BUDGE & TODDIE_
[Illustration: DEDICATION]
The Author of “Helen’s Babies” dedicated that book “To the Parents
of the Best Children in the World”; and his commercial hint appended
thereunto was so generally taken, that he is impelled by selfishness to
seek even a larger class to which to inscribe the present volume. He
therefore dedicates it to
=Those Who Know How to Manage Other People’s Children=.
Introduction
The many indulgent men and women who liked “Helen’s Babies” so well
that they wished they had written it themselves would have changed
their minds could they have been compelled to read criticisms of a
certain kind that were inflicted upon the author as soon as his name
and mail address became known. Some people were in such haste to
relieve their minds that they rushed into print with their charges and
specifications, all of which were of service to the book, as so much
free advertising; at least, the publisher said it was, and his opinion
on such a matter was entitled to special respect.
Some of the critics were parents of the earnest, forceful, but
matter-of-fact kind that does not doubt its own infallibility in family
government and regards all children as scions of one unchanging stock
and needing to be treated exactly alike, no matter in what direction
their tendencies may be. A larger number were unmarried persons with
theories of their own which had not been marred in whole or in part by
anything so utterly commonplace and exasperating as experience. These
good people, whether uncles or aunts of children over whom they were
not allowed to exercise any authority, or mere bachelors and maids
unattached to anybody’ babies of any kind, joined in abusing Budge and
Toddie as the worst trained children that ever were tossed into print
and in declaring the boys’s Uncle Harry incomparably incapable as a
disciplinarian, unless, indeed, the parents of Budge and Toddie were
still less competent to bring up children in the way they should go.
Still another class was composed of professional teachers who had
taken long, serious courses of instruction in juvenile humanity, its
nature, possibilities, limitations, duties and mental conditions at
specified ages. Apparently these regarded a child as something created
for the special purpose of being subjected to personal, exact and
continuous domination by adults, and to be let alone only when the
adults themselves wearied of the strain. To prove the unfitness of the
boys’s uncle and their parents to have the care of children they quoted
fluently from standard authorities on education, all the way from
Aristotle, concerning whose children history is silent, to Froebel, the
founder of the kindergarten system, who was childless.
Others who joined in the effort to analyze this literary butterfly with
a mallet were of the class that could not understand why the misdeeds
and shortcomings of Budge and Toddie were not treated with reproofs and
warnings deduced from certain catechisms, of which infant depravity is
a popular feature. And there were the people that never read a book but
on compulsion. Anyone errs greatly who believes that this class lacks
intelligence, for the world has contained many wondrously clever people
who could not read or write; nevertheless, men and women who seldom
read anything do take any book seriously, no matter if it deserves
as little attention as last year’s almanac. Some of them sought out
the author, after reading “Helen’s Babies,” to tell him in good faith
what they would have done to Budge and Toddie to correct some alleged
deficiencies.
It was useless to assure any of these unexpected critics that the
author was not himself the hero of his story, or that he had never been
manager of other people’s children when he was a bachelor, unless
unwillingly and for a few moments at a time, or that his book was not
in any sense a disclosure of the methods he would have followed had
such a responsibility been thrust upon him, or that it was no longer
fashionable for a man to write an amusing sketch for the purpose
of covertly inculcating a lot of moral principles, like so many
sugar-coated pills, or that for some years he had been joint owner of
some children to whose mental and moral well-being he had given more
thought and care than to his business interests and almost everything
else that men live for, and consequently he might be regarded as beyond
the need of volunteer counsel and admonition.
The criticisms continued until the author repented of having written
the story that was the cause of them. But one day a publisher asked
for some more--much more--about Budge and Toddie, to be published
serially, and the inducements he offered were so timely and convincing
that regrets and critics alike were laughed at. The stock of available
material was unlimited, for had not many mothers reproached the author
for not having put into print the tales they had told him of their
own boys’s doings--tales which they knew were far funnier than any
recorded in “Helen’s Babies”--and had not many other mothers given
him capital stories with positive orders to put them in shape for
publication and do so quickly? Besides, he had a store of similar
material in his own mind. How to use the aggregate mass of incident did
not readily appear to his mind’s eye, for he had been too long engaged,
professionally, in picking other men’s books to pieces to have found
time to learn how best to put together a book of his own. He had not
a novelist’s privilege of choosing from many meritorious models, for
tales about children, yet written principally to be read by adults,
were very few and of doubtful quality.
Suddenly out of nowhere, apparently, came the suggestion that the
possible experiences of some one, any one, of the critics who knew
exactly how other people’s children should be managed would be a good
framework for the desired story. Naturally the person most confident of
such ability would be the best character for the purpose, so it should
be a young, whole-hearted woman of positive nature, who loved children
dearly but had none of her own to disarrange her theories. Facts
have always been the most pestilent enemies of theories, and children
are facts, sometimes stubborn facts, always startling ones when they
encounter any theory not founded on the rock of experience.
So the tale was begun in haste, as well as in glee over its probable
effect on some of the men and women who had been burdening the author’s
ears and mail-box with criticism and counsel. Whether any of them ever
read a line of it when it appeared serially, or afterward in book
form, remains unknown; probably it is better so, for the author was
thereby spared the meanness of exultation over men and women quite as
well-meaning as himself, or spared the humiliation of discovering that
he had done his work so badly that they were unconscious of what he had
attempted to do. And, really, none of them was any wiser in his own
conceit than was the author himself before he had any children of his
own yet was sure he knew how other people’ children should be trained,
admonished, controlled, restrained, disciplined and otherwise tormented
by their parents.
The new book was spared a depressing experience of its predecessor,
for, instead of being declined by almost every reputable publisher
in the United States, it was demanded by several before the second
instalment appeared and the number of requests for it increased week by
week as the serial issue continued.
But, like almost everything else from the same pen, “Other People’s
Children” was written so hastily and put to press so carelessly that it
abounded in repetitions and other errors that made cultivated readers
grieve, so an opportunity to allow the book to drop out of print was
welcomed by the author.
Nevertheless he was compelled to believe his friends and enemies when
they insisted that “Other People’s Children” was an abler and more
amusing story than “Helen’s Babies,” for their opinion agreed with
his own. So he has responded gladly to the request of the present
publishers that he should give the copy a careful revision. It is
extremely unlikely that any reader of the old edition will detect any
alterations in the new, for nothing has been added nor has anything of
consequence been taken out; yet the author and publishers know that
more than a thousand corrections and emendations have been made and
that almost all of them were needed.
CONTENTS
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CHAPTER I 1