in.

"No, nobody dead," said the boy, as he laid his head on a sofa pillow,
closed his eyes, and placed the picture inside his vest. "But I wish
there was. I wish I was dead."

"How many times have I told you to put oil on cucumbers, and they
wouldn't gripe you that way?" said Uncle Ike, as he drew a chair up
beside the lounge and felt of the boy's pulse, and took his handkerchief
and wiped the perspiration off his forehead, and finally took the
picture out of his bosom and looked at it.

[Illustration: She is a nice, warm-looking girl 085]

"She is a nice, warm-looking girl, but you might have the picture on
your stomach a week, and it wouldn't draw that colic out of you," and
Uncle Ike gazed with some admiration on the picture of the beautiful
girl, whose high forehead, bright eyes, and beautiful chin, showed that
she had the making of a rare and radiant woman.

"'Tain't colic, and I haven't et no cucumbers," said the boy, as he
rolled his eyes up toward the roof of his head. "It's love, that's what
it is, and I am miserable, and Aunt Almira said you had been in love
over six hundred times, and could tell me what to do."

"Well, I like your Aunt Almira's nerve," said Uncle Ike, as he looked
half pleased at the accusation. "Of course, I have had some encounters
with the fair sex, but I have never entirely collapsed, the way you
have. What's the symptoms? Don't the girl love you?"

"Yes! Gosh, she idolizes me," said the boy, sitting up, and getting a
little color in his face.

"Oh, then you don't love her," said Uncle Ike, probing into the wound.

"It's false," said the boy, getting on his feet and standing before the
old man in indignation. "I love the very ground she walks on. Say, when
I walk a few blocks with her, and can't see her again for a week, I go
around the other six days and look at the boards she walked on, and it
makes me mad to see anybody else walking where she did. I want to get
rich enough to buy all the houses we have walked by, and the street
cars we have rode in. Love her? Say, you don't know anything about love,
Uncle Ike. The love you used to have was old style, and didn't strike
in."

"Oh, I don't know," said Uncle Ike, "its all about the same. Was the
same in Bible times, and will be the same hundreds of years hence,
when we conquer the Philippines. Same old thing. Nobody invents any new
symptoms in the love industry. There may be new languages to express
it in, but it is just plain