--don't
moon about the bath room and try to sing, Jims!" His mother thrust him
towards the stairs and as he ascended like a bell boy expecting a tip,
watched him from sight.

Jimmy paused to look through his open window of his room at a big elm
whose branches he could almost touch. "Hello Bill, old feller. Glad to
see you looking well. How's the birds' nest business this summer? Oh.
Got a dozen aboard have you, and you say mostly robins? Well, well,
well! That's good! Tell 'em to sing to me at six o'clock to-morrow
morning, will you? Thanks!"

He smiled fondly at the lawns and homely flower beds in the rear and
thrust his head far out of the window to estimate the growth of a
creeper that he had planted with his own hands. It seemed to him that
there was no home, anywhere, as homelike as this old-fashioned house
that since the death of his father he had gradually modernized inside to
suit his tastes, despite his mother's protests against his extravagance.
He rarely thought of those hard years following the death of his father,
when the home was learned to be the sole remaining asset of what had
been regarded as a fine prosperity; of how he had insisted on its
retention; of how he had been compelled to work out of school hours; of
his and his mother's reluctant surrender of the cherished dream that he
might go through Yale; of how, long after he had found employment to
support his mother, he had doggedly insisted on night study to complete
his education following the foolish traditions of nearly every old
Southern family that its male members must have a profession. Sometimes
he remembered how reluctantly he had abandoned his dream of becoming a
lawyer because he could not afford to let an opening "on the road" at a
good salary pass by; but he was secretly proud of the fact that he had
bravely concealed all the disappointment.

"My mother, our home, a few good friends, a little more in the bank at
the end of each year and something each day to give me a laugh. What
more could a man wish!" This had become his creed and he lived up to it
in all ways, even if he had to create the laugh for his own amusement.
He had gradually learned the hard lesson that a wise man cuts his suit
to fit the cloth at his disposal and was thereby content. He had learned
to lose with a grin and win without a boast.

Mr. James Gollop, despite his unserious demeanor when abroad, never
departed from his home to resume his never ending circle "o