ul, well-preserved woman of
forty or thereabouts, who had been born with her eye-teeth cut. He
found her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey finally came out of
his trance he was the stepfather of the widow's four children.

She was very kind to Chauncey, and treated him like one of her own sons;
but she was very, very firm. There was no gallivanting off alone, and
when they went out in double harness strangers used to annoy him
considerable by patting him on the head and saying to his wife: "What a
bright-looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins!"

She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while back, and they
say that he began to take notice again on the way home from the funeral.
Anyway, he crowded his mourning into sixty days--and I reckon there was
plenty of room in them to hold all his grief without stretching--and his
courting into another sixty. And four months after date he presented his
matrimonial papers for acceptance. Said he was tired of this
mother-and-son foolishness, and wasn't going to leave any room for doubt
this time. Didn't propose to have people sizing his wife up for one of
his ancestors any more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was just
turned eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up like a
late pippin that has been out overnight in an early frost.

He took Lu to Chicago for the honeymoon, and Mose Greenebaum, who happened
to be going up to town for his fall goods, got into the parlor car with
them. By and by the porter came around and stopped beside Chauncey.

"Wouldn't your daughter like a pillow under her head?" says he.

Chauncey just groaned. Then--"Git; you Senegambian son of darkness!" And
the porter just naturally got.

Mose had been taking it all in, and now he went back to the smoking-room
and passed the word along to the drummers there. Every little while one
of them would lounge up the aisle to Chauncey and ask if he couldn't
lend his daughter a magazine, or give her an orange, or bring her a
drink. And the language that he gave back in return for these courtesies
wasn't at all fitting in a bridegroom. Then Mose had another happy
thought, and dropped off at a way station and wired the clerk at the
Palmer House.

When they got to the hotel the clerk was on the lookout for them, and
Chauncey hadn't more than signed his name before he reached out over his
diamond and said: "Ah, Mr. Hoskins; would you like to have your daughter
near you?"

I simply me