tired. A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now and then. I
don't suppose there's another green thing in New York that sees as much
of gay life unless it's the chartreuse or the sprigs of parsley around
the dish.

When the girl opens the door in steps a young chap in a traveling cap
and picks her up in his arms, and she sings out "Oh, Dick!" and stays
there long enough to--well, you've been a rubber plant too, sometimes,
I suppose.

"Good thing!" says I to myself. "This is livelier than scales and
weeping. Now there'll be something doing."

"You've got to go back with me," says the young man. "I've come two
thousand miles for you. Aren't you tired of it yet. Bess? You've kept
all of us waiting so long. Haven't you found out yet what is best?"

"The bubble burst only to-day," says the girl. "Come here, Dick, and
see what I found the other day on the sidewalk for sale." She brings
him by the hand and exhibits yours truly. "How one ever got away up
here who can tell? I bought it with almost the last money I had."

He looked at me, but he couldn't keep his eyes off her for more than a
second. "Do you remember the night, Bess," he said, "when we stood
under one of those on the bank of the bayou and what you told me then?"

"Geewillikins!" I said to myself. "Both of them stand under a rubber
plant! Seems to me they are stretching matters somewhat!"

"Do I not," says she, looking up at him and sneaking close to his vest,
"and now I say it again, and it is to last forever. Look, Dick, at its
leaves, how wet they are. Those are my tears, and it was thinking of
you that made them fall."

"The dear old magnolias!" says the young man, pinching one of my
leaves. "I love them all."

Magnolia! Well, wouldn't that--say! those innocents thought I was a
magnolia! What the--well, wasn't that tough on a genuine little old
New York rubber plant?

OUT OF NAZARETH

Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it
with a "wad." Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt,
a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that
showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town. These
things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to
the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist. Okochee
felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only
alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that h