ithographs of teachers, old maids, dudes, and the like, with equally
horrible verses under them. They cost a penny apiece, and you bought
'em at Damon's drug store. They were so wicked that Emily Ruggles
wouldn't sell 'em."

"Emily Ruggles's!" exclaimed Old Hundred. "Shall you ever forget Emily
Ruggles's? It was in Lyceum Hall building, a little dark store up a
flight of steps--a notion store, I guess they called it. To us kids it
was just Emily Ruggles's. It was full of marbles, tops, 'scholars'
companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines,
fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools,
needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over
strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster
with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed
and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which
side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often
wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us
youngsters, for all her forbidding manner."

"Of course she loved us," said I. "She loved her country, too. Don't
you remember the story of how she paid for a substitute in the Civil
War, because she couldn't go to the front and fight herself? Poor
woman, she took the only way she knew to show her affection for us.
She stocked her little shop with a delectable array which kept a
procession of children pushing open the door and timidly yet joyfully
entering its dark recesses, where bags of marbles and bundles of
pencils gleamed beneath the canopies of calico. Nowadays I never see
such shops anymore. I don't know whether there are any tops and
marbles on the market. One never sees them. Certainly one never sees
nice little shops devoted to their sale. Children are not important
any longer."

Old Hundred sighed. We walked on in silence, toward the brow of a
hill, and presently the Hudson gleamed below us, while across its
misty expanse the hills of New Jersey huddled into the sinking sun.
Old Hundred sat down on a stone.

"I'm weary," he said, "and my muscles ache, and I'm stiff and sore and
forty-five. Bill, you're getting bald. Wipe your shiny high-brow. You
look ridiculous."

"Shut up," said I, "and don't get maudlin just because you can't chin
yourself ten times. Remember, it's because you're out of practice!"

"Out of practice, out of practice!" he said viciously. "A year at
Muldoon's wouldn't bring