-that is, from the man
who was having the tooth pulled. At the daily dental
hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers
gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair
waiting to see the performance--and help; and the moment
the surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began
to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would
clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one
leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough
to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous
unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive
an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though
you pulled his head off. The surgeons said that pretty
often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst
of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,
after the open-air exhibition was instituted."

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,
death suggested skeletons--and so, by a logical process
the conversation melted out of one of these subjects
and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up
Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he
had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,
a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad
countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,
and without removing his hands from the depths
of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin
of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged
about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,
stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip
against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,
aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,
laid him low, and said with composure:

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious
bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face
with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"

"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git
a show somers if I kin, 'taint no diffunce what--I'm strong
and hearty, and I don't turn my back on no kind of work,
hard nur soft."

"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"

"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I DO learn,
so's I git a chance fur to make my way. I'd jist as soon
learn print'n's anything."

"Can you read?"