t splash.

"That bew'ful girl jus' glanced at me coldly--jus' merely indicated the
door, that bew'ful girl, and I passed out of her life f'rever. Two days
later I found out jus' what eugenic meant, and, b'lieve me, from my
heart, my sincere regret is that I was not college bred before I met
that bew'ful girl!"

Saying this he grabbed a wine-glass from the table and held it close to
his heart in order to illustrate the intensity of his feeling.

The next instant a thick, reddish liquid began to flow sluggishly over
the bosom of his immaculate white shirt and was lost in the region of
his equator, seeing which Dike gave vent to a yell that brought the
waiters on the hot foot.

"I'm stabbed; stabbed!" groaned the startled jag-carpenter, clutching
wildly at his shirt-front as the plate-passers bore him away to a haven
of rest.

"It's my clam cocktail," whispered Stephen to me; "I poured it in his
wine-glass 'cause they was too much tobascum sauce in it for me!"

"Brave boy!" I answered. "It was a kindly deed."

Then we finished our dinner in all the refined silence the Saint
Astormore so carefully furnishes.

Dike's sad story of misplaced affection and an unused dictionary puts us
wise to the fact that in these changeful days even the old-fashioned
idea of courtship has been chased to the woods.

It used to be that on a Saturday evening the Young Gent would draw down
his six dollars worth of salary and chase himself to the barber shop,
where the Bolivian lawn trimmer would put a crimp in his mustache and
plaster his forehead with three cents worth of hair and a dollar's worth
of axle-grease.

Then the Young Gent would go out and spread 40 cents around among the
tradesmen for a mess of water-lilies and a bag of peanut brittle.

The lilies of the valley were to put on the dining-table so mother would
be pleased, and with the peanut brittle he intended to fill in the weary
moments when he and his little geisha girl were not making goo-goo eyes
at each other.

But nowadays it is different.

What with eugenics and the high speed of living Dan Cupid spends most of
his time on the hot foot between the coroner's office and the divorce
court.

Nowadays when a clever young man goes to visit his sweetheart he hikes
over the streets in a benzine buggy, and when he pulls the bell-rope at
the front door he has a rapid-fire revolver in one pocket and a bottle
of carbolic acid in the other.

His intentions are honorable