onnet. You hear me?"
and the old man patted the boy on the back, and his old face looked
angelic, through the tobacco smoke cloud.

"Well, Uncle Ike, you are the queerest man I ever saw," said the
red-headed boy, as he wiped a tear out of his eye with his shirt sleeve.
"There is nothing I can do to agree with you, until you have talked to
me a little. When I feel funny, and want to laugh, you make me cry; and
when I get serious about something, and get you to talking, you get me
to laughing. I never agree with you until you have had your say. But
I agree with you on one thing; you said the other day, when we were
talking about breach of promise, that you were never in love. That's
where you and I are alike. It makes me weary to see some boys in love
with girls, and run around after them, and make themselves laughing
stock of everybody. If a girl should get in love with me, I would tell
her to go to thunder, and I would laugh at her, and tell all the boys
she was silly. There is no good in love. I thought I liked a girl once,
and gave her a German silver ring that I got off an old china pipe stem;
and she loved me just a week, and then she shook me because the German
silver ring corroded on her finger and gave her blood poison. It wasn't
true love, or she would have stuck to me if she had been obliged to have
her finger amputated. Bah! I was so discouraged that I will never have
anything to say to a girl again, and I will grow up to be an old bach
like you, who never did love anybody but a dog. Isn't that so, Uncle
Ike?" "Did I say I never loved any woman?" said Uncle Ike, as he looked
away off, apparently his eyes penetrating the dim past, and a wet spot
on his cheek that kept getting wetter, and spreading around his face,
until he wiped it off with one end of his necktie. "Why, boy, don't you
ever tell your ma, but I have been in love enough to send a man to the
insane asylum. You think you will never love any girl again, on account
of that blood poisoning. Why, blood poison is nowhere beside love. Some
day you will have a girl pass to windward of you, and when cool air of
heaven blows a breath of her presence toward you, the love microbe will
enter your system with the odor of violets that comes from her, and
there is no medicine on earth that will cure you. The first thing you
know you will follow that girl like a poodle, and if she wants you to
walk on your hands and knees, and carry her parasol in your mouth, you
w