first money, don't you?"

And the bad boy went out with a visible limp, and a look of genius
cramped for want of opportunity.

CHAPTER II.

HIS PA PLAYS JOKES--A MAN SHOULDN'T GET MAD AT A JOKE--THE
MAGIC BOUQUET--THE GROCERY MAN TAKES A TURN--HIS PA TRIES
THE BOUQUET AT CHURCH--ONE FOR THE OLD MAID--A FIGHT ENSUES--
THE BAD BOY THREATENS THE GROCERY MAN--A COMPROMISE.

"Say, do you think a little practical joke does any hurt," asked the
bad boy of the grocery man, as he came in with his Sunday suit on, and
a bouquet in his button-hole, and pried off a couple of figs from a new
box that had been just opened.

"No sir," said the groceryman, as he licked off the syrup that dripped
from a quart measure, from which he had been filling a jug. "I hold
that a man who gets mad at a practical joke, that is, one that does not
injure him, is a fool, and he ought to be shunned by all decent people.
That's a nice bouquet you have in your coat. What is it, pansies? Let me
smell of it," and the grocery man bent over in front of the boy to take
a whiff at the bouquet. As he did so a stream of water shot out of the
innocent looking bouquet and struck him full in the face, and run down
over his shirt, and the grocery man yelled murder, and fell over a
barrel of axe helves and scythe snaths, and then groped around for a
towel to wipe his face.

"You condemn skunk," said the grocery man to the boy, as he took up an
axe-helve and started for him, "what kind of a golblasted squirt gun
have you got there. I will maul you, by thunder," and he rolled up his
shirt sleeves.

"There, keep your temper. I took a test vote of you on the subject of
practical jokes, before the machine began to play upon the conflagration
that was raging on your whiskey nose, and you said a man that would get
mad at a joke was a fool, and now I know it. Here, let me show it to
you. There is a rubber hose runs from the bouquet, inside my coat to
my pants pocket, and there is a bulb of rubber, that holds about half a
pint, and when a feller smells of the posey, I squeeze the bulb, and
you see the result. It's fun, where you don't squirt it on a person that
gets mad."

The grocery man said he would give the boy half a pound of figs if
he would lend the bouquet to him for half an hour, to play it on a
customer, and the boy fixed it on the grocery man, and turned the nozzle
so it would squirt right back into the grocery man's face. He tri