OU used to go to--sit on the damp
ground and eat sardines with ants all over 'em? This isn't anything like
that; we just go out on the trolley to this farm-house and have noon
dinner, and dance all afternoon, and have supper, and then come home on
the trolley. I guess we'd hardly of got up anything as out o' date as a
picnic in honor of Miss PRATT!"

Mrs. Baxter seemed unimpressed.

"It doesn't matter whether you call it a picnic or not, Willie. It will
be cool on the open trolleycar coming home, especially with only those
white trousers on--"

"Ye gods!" he cried. "I've got other things on besides my trousers! I
wish you wouldn't always act as if I was a perfect child! Good heavens!
isn't a person my age supposed to know how much clothes to wear?"

"Well, if he is," she returned, "it's a mere supposition and not founded
on fact. Don't get so excited, Willie, please; but you'll either have to
give up the picnic or come in and ch--"

"Change my 'things'!" he wailed. "I can't change my 'things'! I've got
just twenty minutes to get to May Parcher's--the crowd meets there, and
they're goin' to take the trolley in front the Parchers' at exactly a
quarter after 'leven. PLEASE don't keep me any longer, mother--I GOT to
go!"

She stepped into the hall and returned immediately. "Here's your
overcoat, Willie."

His expression was of despair. "They'll think I'm a lunatic and they'll
say so before everybody--and I don't blame 'em! Overcoat on a hot day
like this! Except me, I don't suppose there was ever anybody lived in
the world and got to be going on eighteen years old and had to carry his
silly old overcoat around with him in August--because his mother made
him!"

"Willie," said Mrs. Baxter, "you don't know how many thousands and
thousands of mothers for thousands and thousands of years have kept
their sons from taking thousands and thousands of colds--just this way!"

He moaned. "Well, and I got to be called a lunatic just because you're
nervous, I s'pose. All right!"

She hung it upon his arm, kissed him; and he departed in a desperate
manner.

However, having worn his tragic face for three blocks, he halted before
a corner drug-store, and permitted his expression to improve as he
gazed upon the window display of My Little Sweetheart All-Tobacco Cuban
Cigarettes, the Package of Twenty for Ten Cents. William was not a
smoker--that is to say, he had made the usual boyhood experiments,
finding them discouraging; a