ll spend most of that
meal wondering why somebody didn't send you one of those hundred and
sixteen piece five-dollar-ninety-eight-marked-down-from-six sets of
china. While I don't mean to say that the average wedding present
carries a curse instead of a blessing, it could usually repeat a few
cuss-words if it had a retentive memory.

Speaking of wedding presents and hundred-thousand-dollar checks
naturally brings to mind my old friend Hamilton Huggins--Old Ham they
called him at the Yards--and the time he gave his son, Percival, a
million dollars.

Take him by and large, Ham was as slick as a greased pig. Before he
came along, the heft of the beef hearts went into the fertilizer
tanks, but he reasoned out that they weren't really tough, but that
their firmness was due to the fact that the meat in them was naturally
condensed, and so he started putting them out in his celebrated
condensed mincemeat at ten cents a pound. Took his pigs' livers, too,
and worked 'em up into a genuine Strasburg pate de foie gras that made
the wild geese honk when they flew over his packing-house. Discovered
that a little chopped cheek-meat at two cents a pound was a blamed
sight healthier than chopped pork at six. Reckoned that by running
twenty-five per cent. of it into his pork sausage he saved a hundred
thousand people every year from becoming cantankerous old dyspeptics.

Ham was simply one of those fellows who not only have convolutions in
their brains, but kinks and bow-knots as well, and who can believe
that any sort of a lie is gospel truth just so it is manufactured and
labeled on their own premises. I confess I ran out a line of those
pigs' liver pates myself, but I didn't do it because I was such a
patriot that I couldn't stand seeing the American flag insulted by a
lot of Frenchmen getting a dollar for a ten-cent article, and that
simply because geese have smaller livers than pigs.

For all Old Ham was so shrewd at the Yards, he was one of those
fellows who begin losing their common-sense at the office door, and
who reach home doddering and blithering. Had a fool wife with the
society bug in her head, and as he had the one-of-our-leading-citizens
bug in his, they managed between them to raise a lovely warning for a
Sunday-school superintendent in their son, Percival.

Percy was mommer's angel boy with the sunny curls, who was to be
raised a gentleman and to be "shielded from the vulgar surroundings
and coarse associations of