contradict a newspaper," said Uncle Ike, as he
thought the matter over. "It has seemed to me for some time that Dewey
had a habit of throwing people overboard that would be liable to get
him into trouble when he gets home, if the habit sticks to him. For that
reason I would suggest that the house that is to be presented to him at
Washington be a one-story house, so he could throw people that did not
please him out of a window and not kill them too dead. When he gets home
and settled down, it is likely he will be called upon by Mark Hanna,
General Alger and others, and they will be very apt to give Dewey advice
as to how he ought to conduct himself, and what he ought to say; and if
he had an office in the top of a ten-story building, the janitor or the
policeman in the street would be finding the remains of some of those
visitors flattened out on the sidewalk so they would have to be scraped
up with a caseknife. Throwing people overboard in Manila bay, and in a
ten-story flagship in Washington, is going to be different."

"Well, boy," said Uncle Ike, as the two wandered around the garden,
looking at the things grow, "there is a sign that tomato cans are ripe,
and you go and get one and I will hold this big, fat angleworm," and
he put his cane in front of a four-inch worm, which shortened up and
swelled out as big as a lead pencil. "I want just a quart of those worms
in cold storage, and tomorrow we will go fishing. Don't you like to go
out in the woods, by a stream, and hook an angleworm on to a hook, in
scallops, so he will look just as though he was defying the fish, and
throw it in, and wait till you get a nibble, and feel the electric
current run up your arm, and then the fish yanks a little, and you can't
refrain, hardly, from jerking, but you know he hasn't got hold enough
yet, and you make a supreme effort to control your nerves, and by and
by he takes it way down his neck, and you know he is your meat, and you
pull, and the electricity just gives you a shock, and----"

"Yes, sir," said the boy, interrupting the old man, "it feels just like
going home with a girl from a party, and she accidentally touches you,
and it goes all up and down you, and he swallows the bait, and you pull
him out and have to take a jackknife and cut the hook out of his gills,
and the angleworm is all chewed up, and when she looks at you as you bid
her goodnight and says it was kind of you to see her home, and puts out
her hand to shake yo