ess houses that was dumped around the
Gallops Junction Hotel like Columbus must have looked at Plymouth Rock
when he landed there.

"I had an immediate notion that the thing for me to do was to go over
to the hotel, an' sit in the shade there, an' study the inhabitants a
while, an' get the gauge of 'em, an' learn their manners an' customs,
before harshly thrustin' myself into their bosoms, so I went an' did
it; but Sammy proceeded immediate to visit their homes with the 'Wage of
Sin' in one hand an' the torch of culture in the other.

"The more I set under the board awning of that hotel the less I
felt like goin' for the to uplift the populace, so I went calmly an'
respectfully to sleep, like everybody else in sight, an' the gentle
hours sizzled past like rows of hot griddles.

"It was contiguous to five o'clock when I woke up, an' I had put three
hours of blissful ignorance into the past, an' I seen it was too late to
begin my labors of helpfulness that day. I crossed my legs the other
way from what they had been crossed, an' I was about to extend my
ruminations to other thoughts, when I noticed a young female exit out of
a grocery store across the road. She had a basket of et ceterys on her
arm, an' a face that was as beautiful as a ham sandwich looks to a man
after a forty days' fast. I recognized her right away as the prettiest
girl of my life's experience, an' as she stepped out I slid out of my
chair an' made up my mind to make a disposal of one copy of that book as
soon as she struck home.

"She went into her house at the back door, as most folks do, an' before
she slid the basket off her plump but modest arm, she looked up in
surprise to see what gentlemanly visitor was knockin' the paint off the
screen door with his knuckles. The glad object that her eyes beheld was
me, smilin' an' amiable, with one hand shyly feeling if my necktie was
loose, while the other concealed behind my back the interesting volume
entitled the 'Wage of Sin.'

"I won't circumlocute about how I got in and got set down on a chair
alongside of the kitchen stove. Approaching the female species promptly
and slick was my hard card always. So there I set, face to face with
that beautiful specimen of female bric-a-brac, and about two inches from
a ten-horse-power cook stove in full blossom. It was a warm day, and
extry warm on the side of me next that stove. The night side of me
felt like sudden fever aggravated by applications of breaths f