men grab at it so much like they was going to set a dislocation of the
shoulder that you can smell the arnica and hear 'em tearing off
bandages. Some take it up like a hot horseshoe, and hold it off at
arm's length like a druggist pouring tincture of asafoetida in a
bottle. And most of 'em catch hold of it and drag it right out before
the lady's eyes like a boy finding a baseball in the grass, without
giving her a chance to forget that the hand is growing on the end of
her arm. Them ways are all wrong.

"I'll tell you the right way. Did you ever see a man sneak out in the
back yard and pick up a rock to throw at a tomcat that was sitting on
a fence looking at him? He pretends he hasn't got a thing in his hand,
and that the cat don't see him, and that he don't see the cat. That's
the idea. Never drag her hand out where she'll have to take notice of
it. Don't let her know that you think she knows you have the least
idea she is aware you are holding her hand. That was my rule of
tactics; and as far as Paisley's serenade about hostilities and
misadventure went, he might as well have been reading to her a time-
table of the Sunday trains that stop at Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

"One night when I beat Paisley to the bench by one pipeful, my
friendship gets subsidised for a minute, and I asks Mrs. Jessup if she
didn't think a 'H' was easier to write than a 'J.' In a second her
head was mashing the oleander flower in my button-hole, and I leaned
over and--but I didn't.

"'If you don't mind,' says I, standing up, 'we'll wait for Paisley to
come before finishing this. I've never done anything dishonourable yet
to our friendship, and this won't be quite fair.'

"'Mr. Hicks,' says Mrs. Jessup, looking at me peculiar in the dark,
'if it wasn't for but one thing, I'd ask you to hike yourself down the
gulch and never disresume your visits to my house.'

"'And what is that, ma'am?' I asks.

"'You are too good a friend not to make a good husband,' says she.

"In five minutes Paisley was on his side of Mrs. Jessup.

"'In Silver City, in the summer of '98,' he begins, 'I see Jim
Batholomew chew off a Chinaman's ear in the Blue Light Saloon on
account of a crossbarred muslin shirt that--what was that noise?'

"I had resumed matters again with Mrs. Jessup right where we had left
off.

"'Mrs. Jessup,' says I, 'has promised to make it Hicks. And this is
another of the same sort.'

"Paisley winds his feet round a leg of the bench an