gun,
waving Jimmie Time, playing them together as cymbals, never loosening
them. It was fine. It filled the eye and appeased the deepest longings
of the ear.

Then from a neighbouring window projected the heroic head and shoulders
of my hostess, and there boomed into the already vivacious libretto a
passionate barytone, or thereabout, of sterling timbre.

"What in the name of--"

I leave it there. To do so is not only kind but necessary. The most
indulgent censor that ever guarded the columns of a print intended for
young and old about the evening lamp would swiftly delete from this
invocation, if not the name of Deity itself, at least the greater number
of the attributes with which she endowed it. A few were conventional
enough, but they served only to accentuate others that were too hastily
selected in the heat of this crisis. Enough to say that the lady
overbore by sheer mass of tone production the strident soprano of Lew
Wee, controlling it at length to a lucid disclosure of his grievance.

From the doorway of his kitchen, inoffensively proffering a final
cigarette to the radiant night, he had been the target of three shots
with intent to kill. He submitted the weapon. He submitted the writhing
assassin.

"I catch 'um!" he said effectively, and rested his case.

"Now--I aimed over his head." It was Jimmie Time alias Little Sure Shot,
and he whimpered the words. "I jest went to play a sell on him."

The voice of the judge boomed wrathfully on this:

"You darned pestering mischief, you! Ain't I forbid you time and again
ever to load them guns? Where'd you get the ca'tridges?"

"Now--I found 'em," pleaded the bad man. "I did so; I found 'em."

"Cooned 'em, you mean!" thundered the judge. "You cooned 'em from Buck
or Sandy. Don't tell me, you young reprobate!"

"He all like bad man," submitted the prosecution. "I tell 'um catch
stlovewood; he tell 'um me: 'You go to haitch!' I tell 'um: 'You ownself
go to haitch! He say: 'I flan you my gun plitty soon!' He do."

"I aimed over the coward's head," protested the defendant.

"Can happen!" sanely objected the prosecution.

"Ain't I told you what I'd do if you loaded them guns?" roared the
judge. "Gentle, limping, baldheaded--" [Deleted by censor.] "How many
more times I got to tell you? Now you know what you'll get. You'll get
your needings--that's what you'll get! All day to-morrow! You hear me?
You'll wear 'em all day to-morrow! Put 'em on first thing in th