thsome
of all animals, and would then lie and smoke the Lord Byron five-cent
cigar, often burning holes in the covers, which he said was another old
trench habit--and that showed what war done to the untainted human soil.
Also while smoking in bed he would tell little Keats things no innocent
child should hear, about how fine it feels to deflate Germans with a good
bayonet. She had never esteemed Lord Byron as a poet, and these cigars,
she assures me, was perfectly dreadful in a refined home, where they
could be detected even in the basement.

Little Keats was now thirteen, with big joints and calf knees showing
under the velvet pants, and I guess his curls was all that persuaded his
mother to live, what with Shelley having gone to the bad and made a name
for himself like Bugs. But little Keats had fell for his brother, and
spent all the time he could with him listening to unpretty stories of
Germans that had been fixed up proper the way the good Lord meant 'em
to be.

After he'd been home a couple weeks or more Shelley begun to notice
little Keats more closely. He looked so much like Shelley had at that age
and had the same set-on manner in the house that Shelley got suspicious
he was leading the same double life he had once led himself.

He asked his mother when she was going to take Keats to a barber, and his
mother burst into tears in the old familiar way, so he said no more to
her. But that afternoon he took little Keats out for a stroll and closely
watched his manner toward some boys they passed. They went on downtown
and Shelley stepped into the Owl cigar store to get a Lord Byron. When he
come out little Keats was just finishing up a remark to another boy. It
had the familiar ring to Shelley and was piquant and engaging even after
three years in the trenches, where talk is some free. Keats still had the
angel face, but had learned surprisingly of old English words.

Then Shelley says to him: "Say, kid, do you like your curls?" And little
Keats says very warmly and almost shedding tears: "They're simply hell!"

"I knew it," says Shelley. "Have many fights?"

"Not so many as I used to," says Keats.

"I knew that, too," says Shelley. "Now, then, you come right along with
me."

So he marches Keats and curls down to Henry Lehman's and says: "Give this
poor kid a close haircut."

And Henry Lehman won't do it. He says that Mrs. Plunkett, the time of
the scandal about Shelley, had warned every barber in town t