out then. I was flounderin' around in
a whole ocean of names, long ones and short ones, fancy and plain, yet I
couldn't quite make up my mind. I'd mussed my hair, shed my collar, and
scribbled over sheets and sheets of paper, without gettin' anywhere at
all. And when I gave up and turned in about eleven-thirty, my head was
so muddled I wouldn't have had the nerve to have named a pet kitten.

I must have just dozed off to sleep when I hears this bell ringin'
somewhere. I couldn't quite make out whether it was a fire alarm, or the
_z_'s in the back of the dictionary goin' off, when Vee calls out that
it's the 'phone.

I tumbles out and paws around for the extension.

"Wha-what?" says I. "What the blazes! Ye-uh. This is me. Wha-wha's
matter?"

And then comes this gurgly voice at the other end of the wire. It's our
old friend Amelia.

"Do you know," says she, "I have just thought of the loveliest name for
your dear baby."

"Oh, have you?" says I, sort of crisp.

"Yes," says she, "and I simply couldn't wait until morning to tell you.
Now listen--it's Ethelbert."

"Ethel-Bert!" says I, gaspy. "Say, you know he's no mixed foursome."

"No, no," says she. Ethelbert--one name, after the old Saxon king.
Ethelbert Ballard. "Isn't that just perfect? And I am so glad it came to
me."

I couldn't agree with her real enthusiastic, so it's lucky she hung up
just as she did.

"Huh!" I remarks to Vee. "Why not Maryjim or Daisybill? Say, I think our
friend Amelia must have gone off her hinge."

But Vee only yawns and advises me to go to sleep and forget it. Well, I
tried. You know how it is, though, when you've been jolted out of the
feathers just as you're halfway through the first reel of the slumber
stuff. I couldn't get back, to save me.

I counted sheep jumpin' over a wall, I tried lookin' down a railroad
track until I could seen the rails meet, and I spelled Constantinople
backwards. Nothing doing in the Morpheus act.

I was wider awake then than a new taxi driver makin' his first trip up
Broadway. I could think of swell names for seashore cottages, for new
surburban additions, and for other people's babies. I invented an
explosive pretzel that would win the war. I thought of bills I ought to
pay next week sure, and of what I meant to tell the laundryman if he
kept on making hash of my pet shirts.

Then I got to wonderin' about this old-maid poetess. Was she through for
the night, or did she work double shifts? If