a time I did win a family photograph album at a pie eating contest.
Huckleberry too! Spoiled a forty-dollar suit of clothes and a two-dollar
tie to win a sixty-cent album at a town fair. Got the album to prove it.
Got it on the parlor table with the marble top down home in Maryland,
and every time Maw looks at it she smiles and says 'Jimmy may be not
much good at anything he's tried yet, but he can eat pie!'"

Now the peculiar part of Jim Gollop's makeup was that underneath all his
banter, and his lightness, and his irresponsible sense of humor, there
lurked something which made him keep his resolutions. He was a pretty
good sort after all. Just a very human, contented, work-a-day man who
liked other good fellows, was sorry for those who took life too
seriously, never did any person a contemplated harm, knew neither malice
nor envy, was always a booster and never a knocker, and whose sense of
humor was generously given out for expansion rather than preserved to
harass his own soul. So, one day, he made a sixty-mile journey out of
his way to see, become acquainted with, and felicitate this judge whom
he so startlingly resembled. For sixty miles he chuckled and bubbled
with anticipation and curiosity. He even thought of a forgotten joke or
two to spring and resolved that what he spent in entertainment for this
meeting should come from his own purse and never appear on the expense
account. True, it cost him a pang to forego that expense account, but he
didn't see how he could ever explain to his firm that it had been
necessary to travel sixty miles and entertain a judge of a state court
in the hope of selling him a big order of chocolate drops. He was afraid
the firm might be skeptical. Some people can't be convinced.

And so, picturing a mutual hand shaking, some lively interchanges and
facetious comments on what constituted good looks and bad looks, perhaps
a luncheon or a dinner, and a new friend through the strange accident of
nature, he climbed the stairs to Judge J. Woodworth-Granger's office
with a cheerful smile on his face, and after a gasp from the office boy
and some stares of astonishment from a clerk or two, was ushered in. He
had expected to enter the tropics. He found himself as "happy as a
Mexican hairless dog in the Arctic regions" as Marshall would say. Cold?
There may be in the vast, dead planets of space places much colder than
the North pole; but these would have been warm and comfortable compared
with