but see
with it.

First off he'd trained it to keep pace with the other, movin' 'em
together, like they was natural; but whenever he wanted to he could
make the glass one stand still and let the other roam around. He
always did that on Friday afternoons when he got up to speak pieces in
the grammar school. And it was no trick at all for him to look wall
eyed one minute, cross eyed the next, and then straighten 'em out with
a jerk of his head. Maybe if it hadn't been for that eye of Snick's
I'd have got further'n the eighth grade.

His star performance, though, was when he did a jugglin' act keepin'
three potatoes in the air. He'd follow the murphies with his good eye
and turn the other one on the audience, and if you didn't know how it
was done, it would give you the creeps up and down the back, just
watchin' him.

Say, you'd thought a feller with talent like that would have made a
name for himself, wouldn't you? Tryin' to be a sport was where Snick
fell down, though. He had the blood, all right, but no head. Why when
we used to play marbles for keeps, Snick would never know when to quit.
He'd shoot away until he'd lost his last alley, and then he'd pry out
that glass eye of his and chuck it in the ring for another go. Many a
time Snick's gone home wearin' a striped chiny or a pink stony in place
of the store eye, and then his old lady would chase around lookin' for
the kid that had won it off'm him. There's such a thing as bein' too
good a loser; but you could never make Snick see it.

Well, I'd marked up five to the bad on my books, and then Swifty Joe
and me had worked an hour with a couple of rockin' chair commodores
from the New York Yacht Club, gettin' 'em in shape to answer Lipton's
batch of spring challenges, when Pinckney blows in, towin' a tubby, red
faced party in a frock coat and a silk lid.

"Shorty," says he, "I want you to know Sir Hunter Twiggle. Sir Hunter,
this is the Professor McCabe you've heard about."

"If you heard it from Pinckney," says I, "don't believe more'n half of
it." With that we swaps the grip, and he says he's glad to meet up
with me.

But say, he hadn't been in the shop two minutes 'fore I was next to the
fact that he was another who'd had to mate up his lamps with a specimen
from the glass counter.

"They must be runnin' in pairs," thinks I. "This'd be a good time to
draw to three of a kind."

Course, I didn't mention it, but I couldn't keep from watchin' how