t was putting on style was an orange-man, and he said he
could whip any St. Patrick's Day man in town. The fellers laid for Pa,
and when he came along one of them threw a barrel at Pa, and another
pulled the yellow handkerchief off his neck, and they all yelled 'hang
him,' and one grabbed a rope that was on the sidewalk where they were
moving a building, and Pa got up and dusted. You'd a dide to see Pa run.
He met a policeman and said more'n a hundred men had tried to murder
him, and they had mauled him and stolen his yellow handkerchief. The
policeman told Pa his life was not safe, and he better go home and lock
himself in, and he did, and I was telling Ma about how I got the boys to
scare Pa, and he heard it, and he told me that settled it. He said I had
caused him to run more foot races than any champion pedestrian, and had
made his life unbearable, and now I must go it alone. Now I want you
to send a couple of pounds of crackers over to the house, and have your
boy tell the hired girl that I have gone down to the river to drown
myself, and she will tell Ma, and Ma will tell Pa, and pretty soon you
will see a bald headed pussy man whooping it up towards the river with
a rope. They may think at times that I am a little tough, but when it
comes to parting forever, they weaken.

"Well, the teacher at school says you are a hardened infidel," said the
grocery man, as he charged the crackers to the boy's Pa. "He says he
had to turn you out to keep you from ruining the morals of the other
scholars. How was that?"

"It was about speaking a piece. When I asked him what I should speak,
he told me to learn some speech of some great man, some lawyer or
statesman, so I learned one of Bob Ingersoll's speeches. Well, you'd a
dide to see the teacher and the school committee, when I started in on
Bob Ingersoll's lecture, the one that was in the papers when Bob was
here. You see I thought if a newspaper that all the pious folks takes
in their families, could publish Ingersoll's speech, it wouldn't do any
hurt for a poor little boy, who ain't knee high to a giraffe, to speak
it in school, but they made me dry up. The teacher is a republican,
and when Ingersoll was speaking around here on politix, the time of the
election, the teacher said Bob was the smartest man this country ever
produced. I heard him say that in a corcus, when he went bumming around
the ward settin' 'em up nights specting to be superintendent of schools.
He said Bob