E PARK--HIS MA APPEARS ON THE SCENE--"IF
YOU LOVE ME KISS ME"--MA TO THE RESCUE--"I AM DEAD AM I?"
HIS PA THROWS A CHAIR THROUGH THE TRANSOM.

"Where have you been for a week back," asked the grocery man of the
bad boy, as the boy pulled the tail board out of the delivery wagon
accidentally and let a couple of bushels of potatoes roll out into the
gutter. "I haven't seen you around here, and you look pale. You haven't
been sick, have you?"

"No, I have not been sick. Pa locked me up in the bath-room for two days
and two nights, and didn't give me nothing to eat but bread and water.
Since he has got religious he seems to be harder than ever on me. Say,
do you think religion softens a man's heart, or does it give him a caked
breast? I 'spect Pa will burn me at the stake next."

The grocery man said that when a man had truly been converted his heart
was softened, and he was always looking for a chance to do good and be
kind to the poor, but if he only had this galvanized religion, this roll
plate piety, or whitewashed reformation, he was liable to be a harder
citizen than before. "What made your Pa lock you up in the bath-room on
bread and water?" he asked.

"Well," says the boy, as he eat a couple of salt pickles out of a jar on
the sidewalk, "Pa is not converted enough to hurt him, and I knowed it,
and I thought it would be a good joke to try him and see if he was so
confounded good, so I got my chum to dress up in a suit of his sister's
summer clothes. Well, you wouldn't believe my chum would look so much
like a girl. He would fool the oldest inhabitant. You know how fat he
is. He had to sell his bicycle to a slim fellow that clerks in a store,
cause he didn't want it any more. His neck is just as fat and there are
dimples in it, and with a dress low in the neck, and long at the trail
he looks as tall as my Ma. He busted one of his sister's slippers
getting them on, and her stockings were a good deal too big for him, but
he tucked his drawers down in them and tied a suspender around his leg
above the knee, and they stayed on all right. Well, he looked killin', I
should prevaricate, with his sister's muslin dress on, starched as
stiff as a shirt, and her reception hat with a white feather as big as a
Newfoundland dog's tail. Pa said he had got to go down town to see some
of the old soldiers of his regiment, and I loafed along behind. My chum
met Pa on the corner and asked him where the Lake Shore Park was. "