“When he does what?” she asked.

The little boy’s lip trembled, and he turned away his face.  He saw it wasn’t any use.  Mother didn’t understand; she evidently hadn’t tried.  It was plain that he was not four years old; he was only three.  It is very hard on little boys to be only that old when they have made up their minds to be four.  So, when David was being dressed, he suffered all the while with a severe case of what is commonly called pouts, but which in reality is something much sadder.

“My, my!” said Mother, as she drew a stocking over the pink toes of his right foot, “one mustn’t look like that on his birthday.”

“It is not my birthday,” he said, not impertinently, but politely and woefully.

Even a pair of new shoes did not prove that this was his birthday, and yet they helped to prove it.  One gets them at such times as Christmas and birthdays, and such a delightful squeak was in these shoes that David could scarcely eat his breakfast for wanting to walk about in them.  If a circus should come to town, he would now be ready for it; he had the shoes.  And besides, there were tassels on them—­wonderful tassels.  It is much easier to be a brave soldier-man if they have tassels.

Do you know what it is to be a brave soldier-man?  Well, to be that, one must be kind and sweet and unselfish and do right.  And doing right is doing mostly what you don’t want to do.  To wash a lot—­that is right; to keep your fingers out of the pie—­that is right; to keep your hands from spilling mucilage on the cat’s back—­that is right.  If you make dents with a tack-hammer in Mother’s piano, that is not right; that is a surprise.

The only safe way of doing right is to think of what you would rather do, and then do something else.  But often this is such hard work that sometimes one doesn’t care much about being a brave soldier-man.

For all that, it’s jolly fine to have soldier shoes.  They came to David in time to save his faith in the business of being four years old.  It now began to have a glad feel about it, and he walked perkily to the garden’s edge, and like a new Columbus about to discover a fresh world, climbed up experimentally and sat on the gate-post.

He was not at all sure that this was a proper place to get waylaid, but something monstrous fine would of course happen before long; there could be no doubt about that.  How people would be astonished when they came along and found that he had grown to be four years old!

Who would be the first, he wondered, to be shocked and surprised at him?  While he was thinking of that, his eyes suddenly brightened with excitement.  The street-sprinkler, the dear old street-sprinkler, was coming!  David’s heart beat faster as he listened to the slow creak and clacking oscillation of the heavy wheels.  Then came the damp, dusty, good smell which always brought to him such a sense of mysterious romance!  No prince out of a fairy