and it. You take a passel of
college fellers, like you want to hire for waiters. S'pose I tell one
of 'em to do something, and he answers back in Greek or Hindoo, or such.
_I_ can't tell what he says. I sha'n't know whether to bang him over the
head or give him a cigar. What's the matter with the waiters we had last
year? They talked Irish, of course, but I understood the most of that,
and when I didn't 'twas safe to roll up my sleeves and begin arguing.
But--"

"Oh, ring off!" says Peter. "Twenty-three!"

And so they had it, back and forth. I didn't say nothing. I knew how
'twould end. If Peter T. Brown thought 'twas good judgment to hire a
mess of college boys for waiters, fellers who could order up the squab
in pigeon-English and the ham in hog-Latin, I didn't care, so long as
the orders and boarders got filled and the payroll didn't have growing
pains. I had considerable faith in Brown's ideas, and he was as set on
this one as a Brahma hen on a plaster nest-egg.

"It'll give tone to the shebang," says he, referring to the hotel; "and
we want to keep the Old Home House as high-toned as a ten-story organ
factory. And as for education, that's a matter of taste. Me, I'd just as
soon have a waiter that bashfully admitted 'Wee, my dam,' as I would one
that pushed 'Shur-r-e, Moike!' edge-ways out of one corner of his mouth
and served the lettuce on top of the lobster, from principle, to keep
the green above the red. When it comes to tone and tin, Cap'n, you trust
your Uncle Pete; he hasn't been sniffling around the tainted-money bunch
all these days with a cold in his head."

So it went his way finally, as I knew it would, and when the Old Home
opened up on June first, the college waiters was on hand. And they was
as nice a lot of boys as ever handled plates and wiped dishes for their
board and four dollars a week. They was poor, of course, and working
their passage through what they called the "varsity," but they attended
to business and wa'n't a mite set up by their learning.

And they made a hit with the boarders, especially the women folks. Take
the crankiest old battle ship that ever cruised into breakfast with
diamond headlights showing and a pretty daughter in tow, and she would
eat lumpy oatmeal and scorched eggs and never sound a distress signal.
How could she, with one of them nice-looking gentlemanly waiters hanging
over her starboard beam and purring, "Certainly, madam," and "Two lumps
or one, madam?" into