say; or,
"My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War"; and
once, "The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house
to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first."

So I asked him a riddle. "What is the difference between Kings Port and
Newport?"

This he, of course, gave up.

"Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all
connected by divorce."

"That's true!" he cried, "that's very true. I met the most
embarrassingly cater-cornered families."

"Oh, they weren't embarrassed!" I interjected.

"No, but I was," said John.

"And you told me you weren't innocent!" I exclaimed. "They are going
to institute a divorce march," I continued. "'Lohengrin' or
'Midsummer-Night's Dream' played backward. They have not settled which
it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies."

He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we
turned in the direction of my boarding-house.

"Did you ever notice," I now said, "what a perpetual allegory
'Midsummer-Night's Dream' contains?"

"I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing."

"Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you
get--well, you get poor Titania."

"She fell in love with a jackass," he remarked. "Puck bewitched her."

"Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that
never happen in Kings Port?"

He began smiling to himself. "I'm afraid Puck isn't all dead yet."

I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. "Shakespeare was
probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in
love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!"

"Yes," he muttered. "Yes."

I followed with another drop. "Titania got out of it. It is not always
solved so easily."

"No," he muttered. "No." It was quite evident that the flavor of my
bitters reached him.

He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now
come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. "But
a disenchanted woman has the best of it--before marriage, at least."

He looked up quickly. "How?"

I evinced surprise. "Why, she can always break off honorably, and we
never can, I suppose."

For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: "Would
you like to take orders from a negro?"

It reduced me to stammering. "I have never--such a juncture has never--"

"Of course you wouldn't. Even