mmy; "but, coming back
to the question I asked, what about William?"

"I asked it first."

"You're beginning to get your hooks in for the last word rather early,
aren't you?"

"Tommy Watson! make no mistake about me. I'm going to have the first
and last word now and--and----"

"To the end of your married life, I suppose," broke in Tommy with a
sigh so heavy that it shook him.

Flo tapped him on the head with the fingers of one dainty hand.
"You're almost intelligent at times, Tommy Watson," she said, with mock
seriousness.

"Yes," he retorted, "yes; almost intelligent enough to go on the
stage," and then he spent the next ten minutes in explaining that he
had meant to convey no reflections; that his sweetheart was the
dearest, most lovable, and most intelligent person in the world; that
he would never have made, and never could make, an actor: that he was
the biggest bonehead in the boundaries of the City of Toronto, and all
his friends and acquaintances knew it. She made him withdraw the last
assertion, and beg her pardon in his nicest manner for insulting
himself and his wife to be, and then came back to the subject of
William.

"There's promise in the boy," she said, "he'll be a great comedian some
day, if he gets a fair start."

"Yes, and he knows it, too," Tommy commented, "confound the kid.
Sometimes he drives me frantic, but all the time I like him. He hasn't
got the faintest notion of ever being anything but a comedian. He's
almost uncanny. What he doesn't think of hasn't been thought of by
anybody yet, I'll bet. He can't find words, often, to tell what his
thoughts are, and then he falls back on the greatest line of slang I've
ever heard. Only yesterday he said to 'Chuck' Epstein, 'Many's the
time when things all go wrong I've felt like going home and crying,
honest. Then, when I'd get home, there's Pa dead tired, but chirpin'
like a cricket, and Ma tired too, but hustlin' around gettin' supper
for Pa and the kids and me, and Dolly and Pete and the others all
waitin' to see what line I'm going to take. So I gets busy and cuts
up, and, say, maybe we don't have the merry ha ha times, and my Pa says
to me often, he says, "William, make 'em laugh; a feller what can hide
the sores in his own heart," he says, "while he's makin' somebody else
laugh," he says, "he's a winner more ways than one." And it's true,
Mister Epstein.'"

"Yes," said Flo, softly, "it's true."

"But now, here's the situat