" but with this, an
exciting accumulation of impressions of Vancouver and San Diego, Florida
and K. C.

"That's a wonderful work farm they have at Duluth," said one, and the
next, "speaking of that, I was in Chicago last week, and I saw a
play----"

Milt had, in his two years of high school in St. Cloud, and in his
boyhood under the genial but abstracted eye of the Old Doctor, learned
that it was not well thought of to use the knife as a hod and to plaster
mashed potatoes upon it, as was the custom in Mac's Old Home Lunch at
Schoenstrom. But the arts of courteously approaching oysters, salad, and
peas were rather unfamiliar to him. Now he studied forks as he had once
studied carburetors, and he gave spiritual devotion to the nice eating
of a canned-shrimp cocktail--a lost legion of shrimps, now two thousand
miles and two years away from their ocean home.

He peeped with equal earnestness at the socks and the shirts of the
traveling men. Socks had been to him not an article of faith but a
detail of economy. His attitude to socks had lacked in reverence and
technique. He had not perceived that socks may be as sound a symbol of
culture as the 'cello or even demountable rims. He had been able to
think with respect of ties and damp pique collars secured by gold
safety-pins; and to the belted fawn overcoat that the St. Klopstock
banker's son had brought back from St. Paul, he had given jealous
attention. But now he graduated into differential socks.

By his campfire, sighing to the rather somnolent Vere de Vere, he
scornfully yanked his extra pairs of thick, white-streaked, yellow
cotton socks from the wicker suitcase, and uttered anathema:

"Begone, ye unworthy and punk-looking raiment. I know ye! Ye werst a
bargain and two pairs for two bits. But even as Adolph Zolzac and an
agent for flivver accessories are ye become in my eyes, ye generation of
vipers, ye clumsy, bag-footed, wrinkle-sided gunny-sacking ye!"

Next day, in the woods, a happy hobo found that the manna-bringing
ravens had left him four pairs of good socks.

Five quite expensive pairs of silk and lisle socks Milt purchased--all
that the general merchant at Jeppe had in stock. What they lost in
suitability to touring and to private laundering at creeks, they gained
as symbols. Milt felt less shut out from the life of leisure. Now, in
Seattle, say, he could go into a good hotel with less fear of the
clerks.

He added attractive outing shirts, ties neit