or, in the Kitchen it is considered neither unmanly nor improper
for a guy to do as his girl advises.

Black her eye for love's sake, if you will; but it is
all-to-the-good business to do a thing when she wants you to do it.

"Turn off the hydrant," said the Kid, one night when Molly, tearful,
besought him to amend his ways. "I'm going to cut out the gang. You
for mine, and the simple life on the side. I'll tell you, Moll--I'll
get work; and in a year we'll get married. I'll do it for you. We'll
get a flat and a flute, and a sewing machine and a rubber plant and
live as honest as we can."

"Oh, Kid," sighed Molly, wiping the powder off his shoulder with her
handkerchief, "I'd rather hear you say that than to own all of New
York. And we can be happy on so little!"

The Kid looked down at his speckless cuffs and shining patent
leathers with a suspicion of melancholy.

"It'll hurt hardest in the rags department," said he. "I've kind
of always liked to rig out swell when I could. You know how I hate
cheap things, Moll. This suit set me back sixty-five. Anything in
the wearing apparel line has got to be just so, or it's to the
misfit parlors for it, for mine. If I work I won't have so much coin
to hand over to the little man with the big shears."

"Never mind, Kid. I'll like you just as much in a blue jumper as I
would in a red automobile."

Before the Kid had grown large enough to knock out his father he
had been compelled to learn the plumber's art. So now back to this
honorable and useful profession he returned. But it was as an
assistant that he engaged himself; and it is the master plumber and
not the assistant, who wears diamonds as large as hailstones and
looks contemptuously upon the marble colonnades of Senator Clark's
mansion.

Eight months went by as smoothly and surely as though they had
"elapsed" on a theater program. The Kid worked away at his pipes and
solder with no symptoms of backsliding. The Stovepipe gang continued
its piracy on the high avenues, cracked policemen's heads, held up
late travelers, invented new methods of peaceful plundering, copied
Fifth avenue's cut of clothes and neckwear fancies and comported
itself according to its lawless bylaws. But the Kid stood firm and
faithful to his Molly, even though the polish was gone from his
fingernails and it took him 15 minutes to tie his purple silk ascot
so that the worn places would not show.

One evening he brought a mysterious bundle with