o please some girl--not but what a nice
sweet woman would be good--"

"Nothing will ever be good for me, aunty. I'm gone. This sweet
civilization of ours has got me. The first reform school I went to
reformed me, all right--formed me into a crook. I used to show signs of
growing up to be fair to middling intelligent, once. But now--nothing to
it. You people, though you're twice as old as I am, you're twice as
young. You got a chance. Look here, Uncle Appleby, why don't you go out
for being one of these famous old pedestrians that get their mugs in the
papers? Will you do what I tell you to, if I train you? I've trained
quite some pugs before--before I quit."

Mother acerbically declined to learn the art of physical culture. "Me at
my time of life learning to do monkey-shines and bending and flapping my
arms like a chicken with its head cut off." But Father enthusiastically
and immediately started in to become the rival of the gentlemen in
jerseys who wear rubber heels in the advertisements and spend their old
ages in vigorously walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific,
merely in order to walk back again.

While his fellow-hoboes about the fire jeered, Father bent over forty
times, and raised himself on his toes sixty, and solemnly took
breathing-exercises.

Next day he slowly trotted ninety times about the clearing, his chin up
and his chest out, while Crook McKusick, excited at being a trainer
again, snapped orders at him and talked about form.... A ludicrous
figure, a little old man, his white locks flapping under a mushy cap as
he galloped earnestly through the light snow. But his cheeks were one
red glow, his eyes were bright, and in his laugh, when he finished, was
infinite hope.

If it had been Mother who had first taken charge of the camp and
converted it to respectability and digestible food, it was Father who
really ran it, for he was the only person who could understand her and
Crook McKusick and the sloppy Kid all at once.

Crook McKusick had long cultivated a careful habit of getting drunk once
a week. But two weeks after the coming of the Applebys he began to omit
his sprees, because Mother needed him to help her engineer variations of
the perpetual mulligan, and Father needed him for his regular training.

To the training Crook added a course in psychology. As a hobo he was
learned in that science. The little clerk, the comfortable banker, the
writer of love-stories--such dull plodders have t