Irenaeus Letters: Originally Published in the New York Observer

Excerpt from Irenaeus Letters: Originally Published in the New York Observer

He was going from Boston to Old Orchard with his mother. I was sorry to be in the same car with them. His mother seemed to exist only to be worried by this uneasy, distressing boy. He had only one fault - he was perfectly insufferable.

If I say he was "an unlicked cub" I shall offend your ears. Lick is an old English word that means either to lap or to strike. Shakespeare uses unlicked as applied to the cub of a bear; there was a notion that the whelp was at first a formless thing that had to be "licked into shape" by the mother's tongue. So it came to pass that the vulgar expression, "an unlicked cub," was fittingly applied to a boy whose mother never gave him the culture essential to make him presentable, or even tolerable, in the society of well-behaved people. The two meanings of the word are not very diverse.

This boy had never been licked into shape. He needed licking. I use the word in its two senses. And the use, if not elegant, is intelligible and expressive, perhaps graphic also. The mother besought him to be still for a moment, but the moment of stillness never came. He wanted something to eat, got it; to drink, and he kept a steady trot through the car; the anxious mother prayed him not to go to the plat form, not to put his head out of the window, not to climb over the seats; all in vain. She might as well have en treated the engine.

In travelling, one is often haunted by people from whom he tries to fly.

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