e white flour on his red nose, when
I thought how the people in church would laugh at Pa. But he went out
feeling mighty bad, and then I got up and pulled the bladder out of my
pants, and Ma and the doc. laughed awful. When Pa got back from church
and asked for me, Ma said that I had gone down town. She said the doctor
found my spine was only uncoupled and he coupled it together, and I was
all right. Pa said it was 'almighty strange, cause I heard the spine
break, when I struck him with the barrel stave.' Pa was nervous all the
afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played it on him. Say, you
don't think there is any harm in playing it on an old man a little for a
good cause, do you?"

The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it was all
right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he would take an
ax to him, and the boy went out, apparently encouraged, saying he hadn't
seen the old man since the day before, and he was almost afraid to meet
him.

CHAPTER XXVI.

HIS PA MORTIFIED--SEARCHING FOR SEWER GAS--THE POWERFUL ODOR
OF LIMBERGER CHEESE AT CHURCH--THE AFTER MEETING--FUMIGATING
THE HOUSE--THE BAD BOY RESOLVES TO BOARD AT AN HOTEL.

"What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?"
said the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen
potatoes at the man who collects garbage in the alley.

"O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got
plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away
for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you
think it is right, when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a
boy?"

"Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you
think is the trouble over to your house, honest?"

"S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead
boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the exposition building
Saturday night, and when they were breaking up, me and my chum helped to
carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese-man gave
each of us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday
morning I opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest
smell I ever heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung
himself in the woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three
weeks. It was just like a old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just