e'd better,
too! I'm not running any old folks' home here."

But it wa'n't to show off how he stood with his son in law that Uncle
Dudley had lugged me along. He'd got so used to bein' dealt out for a
twospot that he didn't seem to mind. He didn't claim to be anything more
even at the office.

It's his flower garden, out back of the house, that Uncle Dudley had got
me 'way out there to see; and, while I ain't any expert on that line of
displays, I should say this posy patch of his had some class to it.
Anyway, seein' it, and findin' out how he rolls off the mattress at
sunrise every mornin' to tend it, lets me in for a new view of him. It's
this little garden patch and the son out West that makes life worth
livin' for him, in spite of Son in Law Bennett.

"Say, Dudley," says I, "why don't you work a combination of the two; go
out where you can raise roses all winter, if the dope these railroad
ads. sling out is straight, and be with your son too?"

"I--I can't do that, just yet," says he, sort of hesitatin'. "You see,
he hasn't seen me for twelve years, and since then I have--er--well,
I've been slipping backward. He doesn't know what a failure I've made of
life, and if I gave up here and went on to him--why----"

"I'm on," says I. "He'd spot you for one of the down-and-outers. But
you do get it rubbed in here good and plenty, don't you?"

"From Bennett?" says he. "Oh, he is right, I suppose. He knows how
useless I am. But we cannot all succeed, can we? Some of us must stay at
the bottom and prop the ladder."

One thing about Uncle Dudley, he had no whine comin'. He takes it all
meek and cheerful, and so far as I could make out he's most as useful
around the office as a lot of others that gets chesty whenever they
think what would happen to the concern if they should be sick for a
week. Anyway, there's frequent calls for old Dudley to straighten out
this or that; but somehow he never seems to get credit for bein' much
more than a sort of a walkin' copybook that remembers what other people
don't want to lumber up their valuable brains with. Maybe it's the white
mud guards, or his habit of lettin' anyone boss him around, that keeps
him down.

And I expect things would have gone on that way, until he either dropped
out or got the blue envelope some payday, if it hadn't been for this lid
liftin' business up at Albany. Course, you've read how they uncovered
first one lot of grafters and then another, and fin'lly, wi