say, ten years, industrious
and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One
lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of
Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from
Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby's Anti-explosive Lamp
Oil Powder. 'Twas when the Oklahoma country was in first bloom.
Guthrie was rising in the middle of it like a lump of self-raising
dough. It was a boom town of the regular kind--you stood in line to
get a chance to wash your face; if you ate over ten minutes you had a
lodging bill added on; if you slept on a plank at night they charged
it to you as board the next morning.

"By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering
choice places wherein to feed. So I looked around and found a
proposition that exactly cut the mustard. I found a restaurant tent
just opened up by an outfit that had drifted in on the tail of the
boom. They had knocked together a box house, where they lived and did
the cooking, and served the meals in a tent pitched against the side.
That tent was joyful with placards on it calculated to redeem the
world-worn pilgrim from the sinfulness of boarding houses and pick-me-
up hotels. 'Try Mother's Home-Made Biscuits,' 'What's the Matter with
Our Apple Dumplings and Hard Sauce?' 'Hot Cakes and Maple Syrup Like
You Ate When a Boy,' 'Our Fried Chicken Never Was Heard to Crow'--
there was literature doomed to please the digestions of man! I said to
myself that mother's wandering boy should munch there that night. And
so it came to pass. And there is where I contracted my case of Mame
Dugan.

"Old Man Dugan was six feet by one of Indiana loafer, and he spent his
time sitting on his shoulder blades in a rocking-chair in the shanty
memorialising the great corn-crop failure of '96. Ma Dugan did the
cooking, and Mame waited on the table.

"As soon as I saw Mame I knew there was a mistake in the census
reports. There wasn't but one girl in the United States. When you come
to specifications it isn't easy. She was about the size of an angel,
and she had eyes, and ways about her. When you come to the kind of a
girl she was, you'll find a belt of 'em reaching from the Brooklyn
Bridge west as far as the courthouse in Council Bluffs, Ia. They earn
their own living in stores, restaurants, factories, and offices.
They're chummy and honest and free and tender and sassy, and they look
life straight in the eye.