ay's
Romeo and Juliet. The office devil, who was late mailing the papers that
night, says that about seven o'clock Mehronay came in singing "Jean,
Jean, my Bonnie Jean," and that he went to his trunk, took out his
celluloid cuffs, a new sky-blue and shell-pink necktie that none of us
had seen before, a clean paper collar--and the boy, who probably was
mistaken, swears Mehronay also took his white shirt--in a bundle which
he proudly tucked under his arm and toddled out of the office whistling
a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black
suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he
appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher
of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked
in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley--late in her
forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so
tightly back from her high stony brow that she had to take out two
hairpins to wink--Miss Merley might have done it--but she had no kith or
kin who could have done it for her, and certainly the hand that smoothed
the coat buttoned the vest, and the hand that buttoned the vest put on
the collar and tie, and as for the shirt----

But that was an office mystery. We never have solved it, and no one had
the courage to tease Mehronay about it the next morning. After that we
knew, and Mehronay knew that we knew, that he and Miss Merley went to
church every Sunday evening--the Presbyterian church, mind you, where
there is no foolishness--and that after church Mehronay always spent
exactly half an hour in the parlour of the house where his divinity
roomed. A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not
look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other
colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it
defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the
girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and
bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person. But Mehronay's
heart was unchanged. The snows of boreal affection did not wither or
fade his eternal spring. The sap still ran sweet in his veins and the
bees still sang among the blossoms that sprang up along his path. He was
everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and
was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most
worshipful ones in t