the knack of keeping it in position, and it fell no more.

Seen from the rear, William was unrecognizable--but interesting.
He appeared to be a walking clothes-boiler, armed with a shield and
connected, by means of a wash-tub, with a negro of informal ideas
concerning dress. In fact, the group was whimsical, and three young
people who turned in behind it, out of a cross-street, indulged
immediately in fits of inadequately suppressed laughter, though neither
Miss May Parcher nor Mr. Johnnie Watson even remotely suspected that the
legs beneath the clothes-boiler belonged to an acquaintance. And as
for the third of this little party, Miss Parcher's visitor, those
peregrinating legs suggested nothing familiar to her.

"Oh, see the fun-ee laundrymans!" she cried, addressing a cottony
doglet's head that bobbed gently up and down over her supporting arm.
"Sweetest Flopit must see, too! Flopit, look at the fun-ee laundrymans!"

"'Sh!" murmured Miss Parcher, choking. "He might hear you."

He might, indeed, since they were not five yards behind him and the
dulcet voice was clear and free. Within the shadowy interior of the
clothes-boiler were features stricken with sudden, utter horror.
"FLOPIT!"

The attention of Genesis was attracted by a convulsive tugging of the
tub which he supported in common with William; it seemed passionately to
urge greater speed. A hissing issued from the boiler, and Genesis caught
the words, huskily whispered:

"Walk faster! You got to walk faster."

The tub between them tugged forward with a pathos of appeal wasted upon
the easy-going Genesis.

"I got plenty time cut 'at grass befo' you' pa gits home," he said,
reassuringly. "Thishere rope what I got my extry tub slung to is 'mos'
wo' plum thew my hide."

Having uttered this protest, he continued to ambulate at the same pace,
though somewhat assisted by the forward pull of the connecting tub, an
easance of burden which he found pleasant; and no supplementary message
came from the clothes-boiler, for the reason that it was incapable
of further speech. And so the two groups maintained for a time their
relative positions, about fifteen feet apart.

The amusement of the second group having abated through satiety, the
minds of its components turned to other topics. "Now Flopit must have
his darlin' 'ickle run," said Flopit's mistress, setting the doglet upon
the ground. "That's why sweetest Flopit and I and all of us came for a
walk, instead o