l sit here by the stove until the end comes.
There is nothing doing now to keep me awake, since you boys quit getting
me mad. Say, boys, do you know, I haven't been real mad since you quit
coming here. The only fun I have had is swearing at my customers when
they stick up their noses at my groceries. It's the funniest thing, when
I tell an old customer that if they don't like my goods they can go plum
to thunder, they get mad and go somewhere else to trade. Times must be
changing. Years ago, the more I abused customers the more they liked it,
and I just charged the goods to them with a pencil on a piece of brown
wrapping paper. I had four cracker boxes full of brown wrapping paper
with things charged on the paper against customers, but when anybody
wanted to pay their account it made my head ache to find it, and so one
day I balanced my books by using the brown wrapping paper to kindle the
fire. If you ever want to get even with the world, easy, just pour a
little kerosene on your accounts, and put them in the stove. I have
never been so free from worry as I have since I balanced my books
in the stove. Well, I suppose you have come home on account of your
dad's sickness," said the old groceryman, turning to the bad boy,
who had written a sign, 'The Morgue,' and pinned it on the window. "I
understand your dad had an operation performed on him in a hospital.
What did the doctors take out of him?"

"Dad had an operation all right," said the bad boy, "but he is not as
much interested in what they took out of him, as what he thinks they
left in. They said they removed his appendix, and I guess they did, for
dad showed me the bill the doctors rendered. The bill was big enough so
they might have taken out a whole lot more. If I had been home I would
never have let him be cut into, but ma insisted that he must have an
operation. She said all the men on our street, and all that moved in our
set, had had operations, and she was ashamed to go out in society and
be forced to admit that dad never had an operation, She told dad that
he could afford it better than half the people that had operations, and
that a scar criss-cross on the stomach was a badge of honor. He never
got a scar in the army, and she simply would not be able to look people
in the face unless dad was operated on. Dad always was subject to
stomach ache, but until appendicitis became fashionable he had always
taken a mess of pills, and come out all right, but ma diagn