g the heat of the summer months Appleboy would rouse
Tunnygate or conversely Tunnygate would rouse Appleboy, and each in his
own wobbly skiff would row out to the spot which seemed most propitious
to the piscatorial art. There, under two green umbrellas, like two fat
rajahs in their shaking howdahs upon the backs of two white elephants,
the friends would sit in solemn equanimity awaiting the evasive cunner,
the vagrant perch or cod or the occasional flirtatious eel. They rarely
spoke and when they did the edifice of their conversation--their Tower
of Babel, so to speak--was monosyllabic. Thus:

"Huh! Ain't had a bite!"

"Huh!"

"Huh!"

Silence for forty minutes. Then: "Huh! Had a bite?"

"Nope!"

"Huh!"

That was generally the sum total of their interchange Yet it satisfied
them, for their souls were in harmony. To them it was pregnant of
unutterable meanings, of philosophic mysteries more subtle than those of
the esoterics, of flowers and poetry, of bird-song and twilight, of all
the nuances of softly whispered avowals, of the elusive harmonies of
love's half-fainting ecstasy.

"Huh!"

"Huh!"

And then into this Eden--only not by virtue of the excision of any
vertebra such as was originally necessary in the case of Adam--burst
woman. There was silence no longer. The air was rent with clamor; for
both Appleboy and Tunnygate, within a month of one another, took unto
themselves wives. Wives after their own image!

For a while things went well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find
out each other's weak points. But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate
unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent's tooth, the
adder's tongue or the cloven hoof--as the reader's literary traditions
may lead him to prefer. For no obvious reason at all she conceived a
violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more
virulent on account of its object's innocently obstinate refusal to
comprehend or recognize it. Indeed Mrs. Tunnygate found it so difficult
to rouse Mrs. Appleboy into a state of belligerency sufficiently
interesting that she soon transferred her energies to the more worthy
task of making Appleboy's life a burden to him.

To this end she devoted herself with a truly Machiavellian ingenuity,
devising all sorts of insults irritations and annoyances, and adding to
the venom of her tongue the inventive cunning of a Malayan witch doctor.
The Appleboys' flower-pots mysteriously fell off the piazza,