oted on Sunday!" said Winona in tones of prim horror.

"It was so hot," he pleaded; "but listen," and he rushed headlong into
his narrative.

His father knew gypsies, and had been to Chicago and Omaha and--and
Cadiz and Cameroon--and he was sorry for Miss Juliana Whipple because
she was a small-towner and no one had ever kissed her since her mother
died; and if ever gypsies did carry him off he didn't want any one to
worry about him or try to get him back; and the Vielhabers were very
nice people that kept a nice saloon; and Mrs. Vielhaber had given him
lots of apple cake that was almost like an apple pie, but without any
top on it; and they had a lovely picture that would look well beside the
lion picture, but it would probably cost too much money; and they had a
monkey, a German monkey, that was just like a little old man; and once,
thousands of years ago, when the Bible was going on, we were all monkeys
and lived in trees, but a constant force made us stand and walk like
people.

To Winona this was a shocking narrative, and she wished to tell Dave
Cowan that he was having a wretched influence upon the boy, but Dave was
now singing "In the Gloaming," and she knew he would merely call her
Madame la Marquise, the toast of all the court, or something else
unsuitable to a Sabbath evening. She tried to convey to the Wilbur twin
that sitting in a low drinking saloon at any time was an evil thing.

"Anyway," said he, protestingly, "you say I should always learn
something, and I learned about us coming up from the monkeys."

"Why, Wilbur Cowan! How awful! Have you forgotten everything you ever
learned at Sunday-school?"

"But I saw the monkey," he persisted, "and my father said so, and Doctor
Purdy said so."

Winona considered.

"Even so," she warned him, "even if we did come up from the lower
orders, the less said about it the better."

He had regarded his putative descent without prejudice; he was sorry
that Winona should find scandal in it.

"Well," he remarked to relieve her, "anyway, there's some catch in it.
My father said so."

CHAPTER VI

Wilber Cowan went off to bed, only a little concerned by this new-found
flaw in his ancestry. He would have thought it more important could he
have known that this same Cowan ancestry was under analysis at the
Whipple New Place.

There the three existing male Whipples sat about a long,
magazine-littered table in the library and smoked and thought and at
long