, and while William Penn's square-toed
shoes, probably, might be made into cloven hoofs without a very
strenuous effort, still he hardly felt as if he could fix up those
knee-breeches to resemble shaggy legs; and as for trying to turn that
hat into a pair of horns, Mr. Whitaker might as well talk of emptying
the Atlantic Ocean through a stomach-pump.

Thereupon, Mr. Whitaker remarked that he had concluded, on the whole,
that it would be better to split the patriarch up the middle and take
the two halves to make a couple of little Cupids, which he could hang
in his parlor with a string, so that they would appear to be sporting
in air. Perhaps the flap of that hat might be sliced up into wings and
glued on the shoulders of the Cupids.

But Mr. Mix said that while nobody would put himself out more to
oblige a friend than he would, still he must say, if his honest
opinion was asked, that to attempt to make a Cupid out of one leg and
half the body of William Penn would be childish, because, if they used
the half one way, there would be a very small Cupid with one very long
leg; and if they used it the other way, he would have to cut Cupid's
head out of the calf of William's leg, and there wasn't room enough,
let alone the fact that the knee-joint would give the god of Love the
appearance of having a broken back. And as for wings, if the man had
been born who could chisel wings out of the flap of a hat, all he
wanted was to meet that man, so that he could gaze on him and study
him. Finally Whitaker suggested that Mix should make the statue into
an angel and sell it for an ornament to a tombstone.

But Mix said that if he should insult the dead by putting up in the
cemetery an angel with a stubby nose and a double-chin, that would let
him out as a manufacturer of sepulchres.

And so Whitaker sold him the statue for ten dollars, and Mix sawed it
up into slabs for marble-top tables. High art doesn't seem to flourish
to any large extent in this place.

CHAPTER XXI.

_CERTAIN DENTAL EXPERIENCES.--AN UNFORTUNATE OFFICIAL_.

Mr. Potts has suffered a good deal from the toothache, and one day
he went around to the office of Dr. Slugg, the dentist, to have the
offending tooth pulled. The doctor has a very large practice; and in
order to economize his strength, he invented a machine for pulling
teeth. He constructed a series of cranks and levers fixed to a movable
stand and operating a pair of forceps by means of a leath