nding to business in the section of sky where it belonged, and the
trees was making shadows on the ground according to science and
nature, and there was a kind of conspicuous hullabaloo going on in the
bushes between the bullbats and the orioles and the jack-rabbits and
other feathered insects of the forest. And the wind out of the
mountains was singing like a Jew's-harp in the pile of old tomato-cans
by the railroad track.

"I felt a kind of sensation in my left side--something like dough
rising in a crock by the fire. Mrs. Jessup had moved up closer.

"'Oh, Mr. Hicks,' says she, 'when one is alone in the world, don't
they feel it more aggravated on a beautiful night like this?'

"I rose up off the bench at once.

"'Excuse me, ma'am,' says I, 'but I'll have to wait till Paisley comes
before I can give a audible hearing to leading questions like that.'

"And then I explained to her how we was friends cinctured by years of
embarrassment and travel and complicity, and how we had agreed to take
no advantage of each other in any of the more mushy walks of life,
such as might be fomented by sentiment and proximity. Mrs. Jessup
appears to think serious about the matter for a minute, and then she
breaks into a species of laughter that makes the wildwood resound.

"In a few minutes Paisley drops around, with oil of bergamot on his
hair, and sits on the other side of Mrs. Jessup, and inaugurates a sad
tale of adventure in which him and Pieface Lumley has a skinning-match
of dead cows in '95 for a silver-mounted saddle in the Santa Rita
valley during the nine months' drought.

"Now, from the start of that courtship I had Paisley Fish hobbled and
tied to a post. Each one of us had a different system of reaching out
for the easy places in the female heart. Paisley's scheme was to
petrify 'em with wonderful relations of events that he had either come
across personally or in large print. I think he must have got his idea
of subjugation from one of Shakespeare's shows I see once called
'Othello.' There is a coloured man in it who acquires a duke's
daughter by disbursing to her a mixture of the talk turned out by
Rider Haggard, Lew Dockstader, and Dr. Parkhurst. But that style of
courting don't work well off the stage.

"Now, I give you my own recipe for inveigling a woman into that state
of affairs when she can be referred to as '/nee/ Jones.' Learn how to
pick up her hand and hold it, and she's yours. It ain't so easy. Some