curus again, and my chum said his liver
was getting torpid some more, and we both took another dose, and started
home and we got generous, and give our nuts all away to some boys. Say,
does liver medicine make a feller give away all he has got? We kept
taking medicine every five blocks, and we locked arms and went down a
back street and sung 'O it is a glorious thing to be a pirut king,' and
when we got home my heart felt bigger nor a washtub and I thought p'raps
my liver had gone to my head, and Pa came to the door with his face
tied up in towels, and some yellow stuff on the towels that smelted like
anarchy, and I slapped him on the shoulder and shouted, 'Hello, Gov.,
how's your liver,' and gave him the bottle, and it was empty, and
he asked me if we had been drinking that medicine and he said he was
ruined, and I told him he could get some more down to the saloon, and he
took hold of my collar and I lammed him in the ear, and he bounced me
up stairs, and then I turned pale, and had cramps, and I didn't remember
any more till I woke up and the doctor was over me, and Pa and Ma
looked scared, and the Doc. had a tin thing like you draw water out of
a country cistern, only smaller, and Ma said if it hadn't been for the
stomach pump she wouldn't have had any little boy, and I looked at the
knobs on Pa's face and I laffed and asked Pa if he got into the hornets,
too. Then the Doc. laffed, and Ma cried, and Pa swore, and I groaned,
and got sick again, and then they let me go to sleep again, and this
morning I had the offulest headache, and Pa's face looks like he had
fell on a picket fence. When I got out I went to my chum's house to see
if they had got him pumped out, and his Ma drove me out with a broom,
and she says I will ruin every boy in the neighborhood. Pa says I was
drunk and kicked him in the groin when he fired me up stairs, and I
asked him how I could be drunk just taking medicine for my liver, and
he said go to the devil, and I came over here. Say, give me a lemon to
settle my stomach."

"But, look-a-here," says the grocery man, as he gave the boy a little
dried up lemon, about as big as a prune, and told him he was a terror,
"what is the matter of your eye winkers and your hair? They seem to be
burned off."

"O, thunder, didn't Pa tell you about the comet exploding and burning
us all? That was the worst thing since the flood, when Noar run the
excursion boat from Kalamazoo to Mount Ararat. You see we had bee