rom the
orthodox bit of brimstone, and even my off side was perspirating some.

"Thus situated before that young female lady, I was baked but joyous,
and I set right in to sell her a 'Wage of Sin.'

"'Ma genully buys books when we buy any, but we never do,' she says.

"'Your ma in now?' I asks, respectful, but in a way to show that her
eyes and hair wasn't being wasted on no desert hermit.

"'Yes, she's in,' she says. 'Looks like it's guna rain.'

"'Its some few warm,' I says, shifting my most cooked side a little.
'Can I converse with your ma?'

"'Only in spirit,' she says. 'Otherwise she's engaged.'

"'Dead?' I asks, her words seeming to imply her ma's having departed
hence.

"'Oh, no,' she says, smiling. 'She's in the front room, talking. She has
a very previous engagement with a gent, and can't break away.'

"'You'll do just as well,' I says, 'if not better. You have that
intellectual look that I always spot on the genooine lover of reading
matter.'

"'If you are gun to talk book, you better git right down to business and
talk book' she says, 'because when I whoop up that stove to git supper,
as I'm gun to soon, it's liable to git warm in this kitchen.'

"I took a look at the cooking apparatus, and decided that she knew what
she was conversing about. I liked the way she jumped right into the
fact that I had a few things to say about books, too. She was an
up-and-coming sort, and that's my sort. It's up-and-comingness that has
made the Kilo Hotel what it is.

"'All right, sister,' I says, 'this book is the famous "Wage of Sin."'

"'No?" she exlamates. 'Not the "Wage of Sin"? The celebrated volume by
our fellow Iowan, Mr. What's-his-name?'

"'The same book!' I says, glad to know its knowledge had passed far down
the State. 'Price one-dollar-fifty per each. A gem of purest razorene.
A rhymed compendium of wit, information, and highly moral so-forths. Ten
thousand verses, printed on a new style rotating duplex press, and bound
up in pale-gray calico. Let me quote you that sweet couplet about the
flood:

"I hear the mother in her grief Imploring heaven for relief As up the
mountain-side she drags Herself by mountain peaks and crags."

"'When I wrote that--'

"'When you wrote that!' she cries joyous, stopping to gaze at me. 'What!
Do I see before me a real, genooine author? Do I see in our humble but
not chilly kitchen a reely trooly author?'

"'Yes'm,' I says, modest, like G. W. when is papa caught