sort of a duck, some like you. His parents were poor, and
lived in the slums of New York. His hair was some the color of yours,
and he loafed around, and made fun of his old uncle, no doubt, the same
as you do. He had to do something to help earn the bread and beer for
the family, and so he went to work stripping tobacco in a factory near
his home. Somehow he got vaccinated with a desire to learn something,
and after he had stripped tobacco, and snuffed it, and got some sense in
his head, he began to learn to read. A girl stripper taught him first to
read the labels on packages of tobacco, and taught him to spell. Then he
got a taste for education, and became the smarty of the factory, and
the boys who could not read called him 'snuff,' because his hair and
freckles were the color of Scotch snuff. Some white man connected with
the factory saw that the little rat had stuff in him, and he helped
him to get an education, and he stripped tobacco daytimes and studied
nights, and became a preacher, and finally a bishop. So, you smarty,
if you want to learn the trade of a bishop, strip the wrapper off
that package of tobacco and fill my pipe. Who knows but Bishop Newman
stripped the very tobacco I am smoking now?" and the old man puffed and
laughed at the boy.

"Gosh! it smells old enough to have been stripped when the bishop was a
boy," said the red-headed boy, and then he dodged behind a table, while
Uncle Ike tried to catch him and teach him how to be a bishop.

CHAPTER X.

Uncle Ike stood with his pipe in his left hand, his thumb pressing the
tobacco down tight, and with a match in his right hand, just ready to
scratch it on his leg, when he froze stiff in that position, and never
moved for five minutes, as he watched the red-headed boy, who had walked
into the room listlessly, his eyes staring at a picture he held in his
hand, his face so pale that the freckles looked large and dark, his lips
white as chalk, his cheeks sunken, his fingers gripping the picture, a
faded and forlorn pansy in his buttonhole, and his short clipped hair
standing up straight in rows like red beet tops in a vegetable garden.

"Anybody very dead?" said Uncle Ike, as he drew the match across the
cloth, put it to his pipe, and began to swell out his cheeks and puff,
keeping his eye on the boy, through the smoke, who had taken his eyes
from the picture, drawn a deep sigh, and sat down on the lounge, as
though he never expected to get up aga