n the head and said I was a nice boy,
and that made me mad, and when he went to sit down beside me on the step
I took my horse chestnut out of my pocket and put it on the step just
where he sat down, and how it happened to come out so I don't know, it
must have been Providence.

[Illustration: Now I lay me down to sleep 094]

You see just as the flunkey flunked on the chestnut burr, the fire
cracker went off, and the man jumped up and said '"Ells-fire, h'am
blowed," and he had his hands on his pants, and the air was full of
smoke, and dad got on his knees and said, "Now I lay me," and Mr. Astor
fainted all over a rocking chair and tipped beer bottles on the veranda
and more than forty servants came, and I told dad to come on, and we got
outside the gate, ahead of the police, and got a cab and drove quicker
than scat to the hotel, and I ast dad what he thought it was that went
off, and he said "You can search me," but he said he had got enough of
trying to reform escaped Americans, and we got in the hotel and laid
low, and the newspapers told about a dynamite outrage, and laid it to
anarchists. Well I must close, cause we are going to see the American
minister and get a date to meet King' Edward. We won't do a thing to
Edward.

Yours,

Hennery.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the
Whitechapel District--He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower
of London.

London, England.--My Dear Chum: I received your letter yesterday, and it
made me homesick. Gee, but if I could be home there with you and go down
to the swimming hole and get in all over, and play tag in the sand, and
tie some boy's pants and shirt in knots, and yell that the police are
coming, and all grab our clothes under our arms and run across lots with
no clothes on, and get in a barn and put on our clothes, and dry our
hair by pounding it with a stick, so we would not get licked when we got
home, life would be worth living, but here all I do is to dodge people
on the streets and see them look cross when they step on me.

Say, boy, you will never know your luck in being a citizen of good old
America, instead of a subject of Great Britain, because you have got
to be rich or be hungry here, and if you are too rich you have got no
appetite. You have heard of the roast beef of old England, but nobody
eats it but the dukes and bankers. The working men never even saw
a picture of a roast beef, and yet we look upon