s chin,
but he took me in.

So this was the person who had appeared without a hat on our highly
respectable streets, and got his shame heralded in the paper! I felt
like saying to him:

"Well, you're a cheerful reprobate, I must say!"

You see, we are nearly all of us shocked by the cheerfulness of the
wicked. We feel that those whom we have set aside as reprobates, or
sinful spectacles, should by good right draw long faces and be
appropriately miserable; and we never become quite accustomed to our
own surprise at finding them happy or contented.

In short, I began to be interested in that reprobate, in spite of
myself. I had come to town intending to have a talk with Anthy and the
old Captain (who was at this moment at work at his desk), but instead I
squatted down on the floor near Nort, and while he tinkered and puttered
and whistled, we kept up a running conversation which we both found
highly diverting.

If there is one thing I enjoy more than another it is to crack open a
hard fellow-mortal, take him apart, as Nort was taking apart his engine,
and see what it is that makes him go round. But in Nort, that morning, I
found more than a match. We parried and fenced, advanced and retreated,
but beyond a firm conclusion on my part that he was no ordinary tramp
printer and, indeed, no ordinary human being, he kept me completely
mystified, and, as I could plainly see, enjoyed doing it, too. He told
me, long afterward, that he thought me that morning an "odd one."

I deny, however, that I was carried away on the spot; I was interested,
but I was now too deeply concerned for my friends on the _Star_ to
accept him entirely. Even after he brought in his first contribution to
our columns, especially the one that began, "There is a man in this town
who quarrels regularly with his wife," I was still doubtful about
him--but I must not get ahead of my story.

Well, it was wonderful the way Nort went through the office of the
_Star_. As I think of it now, I am reminded of the description of a
remarkable plant called the lantana, which I read about recently in an
interesting book on the Hawaiian Islands. It was brought in, a humble
and lowly shrub, to help ornament a garden in those delectable isles.
Finding the climate highly agreeable and its customary enemies absent,
it escaped from the garden, and in a wild spirit of vagabondage spread
out along the sunny roads and mountainsides, until it has overrun all
the islands; an