in the habit of getting--I'd been unlucky, and Lord knows I needed
it!--and what does the dear man do?

Instead of one check, he handed me a sheaf of them, each stamped in divers
places by divers banks. I flipped the ends and looked them over a bit,
because I saw that was what he expected of me; but the truth is, checks
don't interest me much after they've been messed up with red and green
stamps. They're about as enticing as a last year's popular song.

Dad crossed his legs, matched his finger-tips together, and looked at me
over his glasses. Many a man knows that attitude and that look, and so
many a man has been as uncomfortable as I began to be, and has felt as
keen a sense of impending trouble. I began immediately searching my memory
for some especial brand of devilment that I'd been sampling, but there was
nothing doing. I had been losing some at poker lately, and I'd been away
to the bad out at Ingleside; still, I looked him innocently in the eye
and wondered what was coming.

"That last check is worthy of particular attention," he said dryly. "The
others are remarkable only for their size and continuity of numbers; but
that last one should be framed and hung upon the wall at the foot of your
bed, though you would not see it often. I consider it a diploma of your
qualification as Master Jackanapes." (Dad's vocabulary, when he is angry,
contains some rather strengthy words of the old-fashioned type.)

I looked at the check and began to see light. I _had_ been a bit rollicky
that time. It wasn't drawn for very much, that check; I've lost more on
one jack-pot, many a time, and thought nothing of it. And, though the
events leading up to it were a bit rapid and undignified, perhaps, I
couldn't see anything to get excited over, as I could see dad plainly was.

"For a young man twenty-five years old and with brains
enough--supposedly--to keep out of the feeble-minded class, it strikes me
you indulge in some damned poor pastimes," went on dad disagreeably.
"Cracking champagne-bottles in front of the Cliff House--on a Sunday at
that--may be diverting to the bystanders, but it can hardly be called
dignified, and I fail to see how it is going to fit a man for any useful
business."

Business? Lord! dad never had mentioned a useful business to me before.
I felt my eyelids fly up; this was springing birthday surprises with a
vengeance.

"Driving an automobile on forbidden roads, being arrested and fined--on
Sunday, at