ble." And he says to look at Damon and Pythias, and Othello and the
Merchant of Venus. And he named about a hundred prominent couples like
that out of Shakespeare's works.

"But it ends happy sometimes," I says.

"Not when it is true love it don't," says Looey. "Look at Anthony and
Cleopatra."

"Yes," I says, sarcastic like, "I suppose they are in the tomb, too?"

"They are," says Looey, awful solemn.

"Yes," I says, "and so is Adam and Eve and Dan and Burrsheba and all
the rest of them old-timers. But I bet they had a good time while they
lasted."

Looey shakes his head solemn and sighs and goes to sleep very mournful,
like he has to give me up fur lost. But I can't sleep none myself.
So purty soon I gets up and puts on my shoes and sneaks through the
wood-lot and through the gap in the fence by the apple tree and into
Miss Hampton's yard.

It was a beauty of a moonlight night, that white and clear and clean you
could almost see to read by it, like all of everything had been scoured
as bright as the bottom of a tin pan. And the shadders was soft and
thick and velvety and laid kind of brownish-greeney on the grass. I
flopped down in the shadder of some lilac bushes and wondered which was
Martha's window. I knowed she would be in bed long ago, but---- Well, I
was jest plumb foolish that night, and I couldn't of kept away fur any
money. That moonlight had got into my head, it seemed like, and made
me drunk. But I would rather be looney that-a-way than to have as much
sense as King Solomon and all his adverbs. I was that looney that if I
had knowed any poetry I would of said it out loud, right up toward that
window. I never knowed why poetry was made up before that night. But the
only poetry I could think of was about there was a man named Furgeson
that lived on Market Street, and he had a one-eyed Thomas cat that
couldn't well be beat. Which it didn't seem to fit the case, so I didn't
say her.

The porch of that house was part covered with vines, but they was kind
of gaped apart at one corner. As I laid there in the shadder of the
bushes I hearn a fluttering movement, light and gentle, on that porch.
Then, all of a sudden, I seen some one standing on the edge of the porch
where the vines was gaped apart, and the moonlight was falling onto
them. They must of come there awful soft and still. Whoever it was
couldn't see into the shadder where I laid, that is, if it was a human
and not a ghost. Fur my first thought