, taking the candle. "Like a house for rent. I
declare, it gives me the cold shivers."

"I'll pay my dollar gladly, and take a chance for it," whispered a
third, "but I wouldn't let such a thing as that enter my happy home----"

"Neither would I!"

"Nor me, neither. I've had trouble enough. My husband's first wife's
portrait has brought me discord enough--an' it was a straight likeness.
I don't want any more pictures to put in the hen-house loft."

So the feeling ran among the wives.

"Well," said she who was blowing out the candle, "I'll draw for it--an'
take it if I win it, an' consider it a sort of inheritance. I never
inherited anything but indigestion."

The last speaker was a maiden lady, and so was she who answered,
chuckling:

"That's what I say! Anything for a change. There'd be some excitement in
a picture where a man was liable to show up. It's more than I've got
now. I do declare it's just scandalous the way we're gigglin', an' the
poor soul hardly out o' hearin'. She had a kind heart, Mis' Morris had,
an' she made herself happy with a mighty slim chance----"

"Yes, she did--and I only wish there'd been a better man waitin' for her
in that hotel."

THE GHOST THAT GOT THE BUTTON

BY WILL ADAMS

From _Collier's Weekly_, May 24, 1913. By permission of _Collier's
Weekly_ and Will Adams.

The Ghost that Got the Button

BY WILL ADAMS

One autumn evening, when the days were shortening and the darkness fell
early on Hotchkiss and the frost was beginning to adorn with its fine
glistening lace the carbine barrels of the night sentries as they walked
post, Sergeants Hansen and Whitney and Corporal Whitehall had come to
Stone's room after supper, feeling the need common to all men in the
first cold nights of the year for a cozy room, a good smoke, and
congenial companionship.

The steam heat, newly turned on, wheezed and whined through the
radiator: the air was blue and dense with tobacco smoke; the three
sergeants reposed in restful, if inelegant attitudes, and Whitehall, his
feet on the window sill and his wooden chair tilted back, was holding
forth between puffs at a very battered pipe about an old colored woman
who kept a little saloon in town.

"So she got mad at those K troop men," he said. "An' nex' day when
Turner stopped there for a drink she says: 'You git outer yere! You men
fum de Arsenic wid de crossbones on you caps, I ain't lettin' you in;
but de Medical Corpses an' de