e went
by our corner, but he never let on. A couple of hours later Looey comes
into camp and says he is going to quit.

The doctor asts him if he has inherited money.

"No," says Looey, "but my aunt has given me a chancet to go into
business."

Looey says he was born nigh there, and was prowling around town the day
before and run acrost an old aunt of his'n he had forgot all about.
She is awful respectable and religious and ashamed of him being into
a travelling show. And she has offered to lend him enough to buy a
half-share in a business.

"Well," says the doctor, "I hope it will be something you are fitted
for and will enjoy. But I've noticed that after a man gets the habit of
roaming around this terrestial ball it's mighty hard to settle down and
watch his vine and fig tree grow."

Looey smiles in a sad sort of a way, which he seldom smiled fur
anything, and says he guesses he'll like the business. He says they
ain't many businesses he could take to. Most of them makes you forget
this world is but a fleeting show. But he has found a business which
keeps you reminded all the time that dust is dust and ash to ashes shalt
return. When he first went into the medicine business, he said, he was
drawed to it by the diseases and the sudden dyings-off it always kept
him in mind of. He thought they wasn't no other business could lay over
it fur that kind of comfort. But he has found out his mistake.

"What kind of business are you going into?" asts the doctor.

"I am going to be an undertaker," says Looey. "My aunt says this town
needs the right kind of an undertaker bad."

Mr. Wilcox, the undertaker that town has, is getting purty old and
shaky, Looey says, and young Mr. Wilcox, his son, is too light-minded
and goes at things too brisk and airy to give it the right kind of a
send-off. People don't want him joking around their corpses and he is
a fat young man and can't help making puns even in the presence of the
departed. Old Mr. Wilcox's eyesight is getting so poor he made a scandal
in that town only the week before. He was composing a departed's face
into a last smile, but he went too fur with it, and give the departed
one of them awful mean, devilish kind of grins, like he had died with
a bad temper on. By the time the departed's fambly had found it out,
things had went too fur, and the face had set that-a-way, so it wasn't
safe to try to change it any.

Old Mr. Wilcox had several brands of last looks. One was