ade, or a
perfession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window, 'boy wanted,' and
as he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job
for me. This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted
to try all the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty
different extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed
up a bottle of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of
other horrid stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just
wallered in it. It _is_ awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went
into the dining-room the first night that I got home from the store,
and broke Pa all up, He said I reminded him of the time that they had a
litter of skunks under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I
am, and everybody seems to know who fixed it. A girl came in the store
yesterday to buy a satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I
didn't know what it was, and I took down everything in the store pretty
near, before I found it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the
proprietor came in. The girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a
good deal of sewer-gas in the store, and he told me to go out and shake
myself. I think the girl was mad at me because I got a nursing bottle
out of the show case, with a rubber muzzle, and asked her if that was
what she wanted. Well, she told me a satchet was something for the
stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was the nearest thing to it."

"I should think you would drive all the customers away from the store,"
said the grocery man, as he opened the door to let the fresh air in.

"I don't know but I will, but I am hired for a month on trial, and I
shall stay. You see, I shan't practice on anybody but Pa for a spell.
I made up my mind to that when I gave a woman some salts instead of
powdered borax, and she came back mad. Pa seems to want to encourage me,
and is willing to take anything that I ask him to, He had a sore throat
and wanted something for it, and the boss drugger told me to put some
tannin and chlorate of potash in a mortar, and grind it, and I let
Pa pound it with the mortar, and while he was pounding I dropped in a
couple of drops of sulphuric acid, and it exploded and blowed Pa's
hat clear across the store, and Pa was whiter than a sheet. He said he
guessed his throat was all right, and he wouldn't come near me again
that day. The next day Pa came in and I was laying for him. I t