shake the growler, let's get it filled at
the corner, and all have a drink on me."

Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia
producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and
Maltese cats.

That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to
sell out quick and keep moving. We unloaded our grubstaker for eight
thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town
of Rosa, on the Salmon river, to rest up, and get some human grub,
and have our whiskers harvested.

Rosa was no mining-camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of
uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country.
There was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs;
and me and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping
off at nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well
as travelled, we was soon _pro re nata_ with the best society in
Rosa, and was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned
entertainments. It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in
the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho
first met Mrs. De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.

Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town.
It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see
it as plain as egg on the chin of an O'Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two
men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that
yellow house.

There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been raked
out of the Hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs.
Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked
permission to escort her home. That's where I made a hit.

On the way home says she:

"Ain't the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr. Pratt?"

"For the chance they've got," says I, "they're humping themselves in a
mighty creditable way. That big one you see is sixty-six million miles
distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. With
an eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of 'em,
including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go
out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years."

"My!" says Mrs. Sampson. "I never knew that before. How warm it is!
I'm as damp as I can be from dancing so much."

"That's easy to account for," says I, "when you happen to know that