y, and try and
recuperate our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to
call him Pa, but to act as though I was his younger brother, and we
would have a real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old
masher, that's what's the matter with him, and he was going to play
himself for a batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute.
He was introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced
till the cows come home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatic, and he
never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off'n him,
and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he
would freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was
joking him about being a nold batch, that he was not sure as he could
always hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with
the charming ladies of the Sunny South, I pulled his coat and said,
'Pa how do you spose Ma's hay fever is to-night. I'll bet she is just
sneezing the top of her head off." Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that
girl and Pa. Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the
porter if that freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house
he had better be fired out of the ball-room, and the girl said the
disgustin' thing, and just before they fired me I told Pa he had better
look out or he would sweat through his liver pad.

"I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad
when he came to bed, but he didn't lick me, cause the people in the next
room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I
might go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat
around on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and
when he would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl
out boat riding, and when I asked him if I couldn't go along, he said
he was afraid I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there
was nothing there too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing
bottles of champane, and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove
him out doors and was just going to shell his earth works, when the
policeman collared me. Say, what's good for a black eye?"

The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home, "What do
you think your Pa's object was in passing himself off for a single man
at Oconomowoc," asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to
the boy's father.