ent to breakfast.

"O, Pa and the minister can't make a first payment on me. Pa gets mad
when I ask questions, and the minister thinks I am past redemption. Pa
said yesterday that baldness was caused, in every case, by men's wearing
plug hats, and when I asked him where the good Elisha, (whom the boys
called 'go up old bald head,' and the bears had a free lunch on them,)
got his plug hat, Pa said school was dismissed and I could go. When
the minister was telling me about the good Elijah going up through the
clouds in a chariot of fire, and I asked the minister what he thought
Elijah would have thought if he had met our Sunday school superintendent
coming down through the clouds on a bicycle, he put his hand on my head
and said my liver was all wrong. Now, I will leave it to you if there
was anything wrong about that. Say, do you know what I think is the most
beautiful thing in the Bible?"

"No I don't," said the grocery man, "and if you wan't to tell it I will
listen just five minutes, and then I am going to shut up the store and
go to breakfast. You make me tired."

"Well, I think the finest thing is that story about the prodigal son,
where the boy took all the money he could scrape up and went out West
to paint the towns red. He spent his money in riotous living, and saw
everything that was going on, and got full of benzine, and struck all
the gangs of toughs, both male and female, and his stomach went back
on him, and he had malaria, and finally he got to be a cow-boy, herding
hogs, and had to eat husks that the hogs didn't want, and got pretty low
down. Then he thought it was a pretty good scheme to be getting around
home, where they had three meals a day, and spring mattresses; and he
started home, beating his way on the trains, and he didn't know whether
the old man would receive him with open arms or pointed boots; but the
old man came down to the depot to meet him, and right there before the
passengers, and the conductor and brakemen, he wasn't ashamed of his
boy, though he was ragged, and looked as though he had been on the war
path; and the old man fell on his neck and wept, and took him home in a
hack, and had veal pot pie for dinner. That's what I call sense. A good
many men now days would have put the police on the tramp and had him
ordered out of town. What, you going to close up the store? Well, I will
see you later. I want to talk with you about something that is weighing
on my mind," and the boy got o