The good woman eventually married, and I think lost some of her painful primness; but the word she helped me to invent still survives. I have been told that friends who have visited our home and could appreciate the word's meaning, have also incorporated it in their vocabularies. In some ways human beings the world over could be divided up into the "spunctuated" and the "unspunctuated."
In the annex attached to my grandmother's home my village life and early boyhood found their completion. When we left this home the family became scattered, one going one way and the others some other way; we have never all been together since the break-up. My brother, for instance, I have not seen in nearly twenty years, and have no idea where he is to-day. He also was possessed of _Wanderlust_, indeed we might as well call ourselves a _Wanderlust_ family, because every one of us has covered more territory at home and abroad than the average person can find time, or cares, to explore. While living in the interim house my mother tried an experiment with me. She sent me away to a boys' boarding school about fifty miles north of Chicago. There had been a general family council of grandparents, uncles and aunts, and it was hoped that a change of control and discipline would achieve changes for the better in me.
The school was in the hands of an old English pastor and his wife, and they had succeeded in giving a certain English look to the old white building and grounds. My mother and I arrived at this institution of learning, so-called, one evening about supper time. The other boys, twenty-odd in number, ranging in years from ten to eighteen, were in the dining room munching their bread and molasses. It seemed to me at the time that I should certainly die when my mother left, and I should be alone with that rabble. Compromises and taking a back seat were to be inevitable in all intercourse with the larger boys, and the lads of my own age looked able to hold their own with me in any struggle that might occur. It was plain that I could bully no longer, and there was a possibility that the tables would be turned, and that I should be the one bullied. These thoughts busied me very much that night, which I spent with the master in his room. By morning I had half-a-dozen escapes well planned, leading back to the home village, and they lightened the parting from my mother, who seemed quite pleased with the school.