. "It seems to me the farmers ought to be encouraged. I wonder
how many hundred dollars it cost to hire that girl to go up in a
balloon; and what good could that exhibition do the farmers? If that
girl's parachute hadn't parachuted at the proper time, and she had come
down and been killed, wouldn't the people have been so horrified they
would never go to another fair, and couldn't the state have been sued
for damages for hiring her to kill herself?"

"Oh, maybe," said the old man, winding up his watch a lot ahead, and
holding it to his ears to see if it had heart disease, as the boy had
intimated. "But, you see, people have got to be amused. It has got so
there is not the inspiration in looking at vegetables that there used
to be, and the patchwork quilt does not draw like a house afire. The
farmers are not going to blow in money to exhibit things for a blue
ribbon, and the wealthy people who have fancy stock take the premiums
and advertise their business. Money is paid for exhibits that more
properly belong to the circus and the vaudeville, that ought to be paid
in premiums to farmers who raise things. We hire a balloonist, believing
that she will fall and kill herself before the season is over. We take
the chance that she will kill herself at our fair, but if she does not,
and is killed at some cheap fair, somewhere else, we feel that we are
abused, and have been trifled with. What interested you the most at the
fair?" asked the old man.

"The wieners," said the boys, all at once. And the red-headed boy added:
"When a feller is so hungry his eyes look straight ahead, and he can't
turn them in the sockets, there is nothing like a hot wiener to start
things moving, and the man who invented wieners ought to have a chromo.
By gosh, I am going to bed," and the boys all started for their resting
places, while Uncle Ike felt of his stomach where the fob rested, and
looked as happy as though he had never been robbed.

"Come on, Mr. Train-robber," said Uncle Ike the next morning, as the boy
showed up in the breakfast room, and the old man held up his hands as he
supposed passengers did when train-robbers attacked a train. "Go through
me, condemn you, and take every last dollar I have got. I have brought
you up to be an honest boy, and you turn out to be a pickpocket, and rob
me of my watch. Oh, I tell you, no old bachelor ever had so much
trouble bringing up a boy as I have. Now, I expect you will graduate in
burglary, bunko