e leading thoroughfares
of Enochsville and Edensburg commanded the highest and steadiest
rents, and was the chief stock-holder in the Ararat Corners and Red
Sea Traction Company, running an hourly service of Pterodactyls and
Creosauruses between the most populous points of the country. This
naturally made of Uncle Zib a nearer approach to a Captain of Finance
than anything else known to our time, and inasmuch as he had never
married, and was without an heir, my father thought he would
appreciate the compliment of having his first-born named for him. But
Uncle Zib's moral character was of such a nature that his name seemed
to my mother as hardly a fit association for an infant of my tender
years. He was known to be addicted to pinochle to a degree that had
caused no end of gossip at the Ararat Woman's Club, and before he had
reached the age of three hundred he had five times been successfully
sued in the courts for breach of promise. Indeed, if Uncle Zib had had
fewer material resources he would long since have been ostracised by
the best people of our section, and even as it was the few people in
our neighborhood to whom he had not lent money regarded his social
pretensions with some coolness. The fact that he had given Enochsville
a public library, and had filled its shelves with several tons of the
best reading that the Egyptian writers of the day provided, was
regarded as a partial atonement for some of his indiscretions, and the
endowment of a large stone-quarry at Ararat where children were taught
to read and write, helped materially in his rehabilitation, but on the
whole Uncle Zib was looked upon askance by the majority. On the other
hand Uncle Azag, a strong, pious man, who owed money to everybody in
town, was the one after whom my mother wished me to be named, a
proposition which my father resisted to the uttermost expense of his
powers.

"What's the use?" I heard him ask, warmly. "He'll get his name on
plenty of I. O. U.'s on his own account before he leaves this glad
little earth, without our giving him an autograph that is already on
enough over-due paper to decorate every flat in Uncle Zib's model
tenements."

The disputation continued with some acrimony for a week, until finally
my father put his foot down.

"I'm tired of referring to him as IT," he blurted out one night.
"We'll compromise, and name him after me and thee. He shall be called
Me for me, and Thou for thee, Selah!"

And so it was that fr