no longer be obliged to lead a sneaking, surreptitious existence. He felt like shouting with joy now that he could look the world frankly in the face. The genuine agony he had endured during the past three weeks loomed like a sickness behind him. He had been a fool-and there was no fool like an old one. Just let him get back to his old Abigail and there'd be no more wandering-boy business for him! Abigail might not have the figure or the complexion that Georgie had, but she was a darn sight more reliable. Henceforth she could have him from five p. m. to nine a. m. without reserve. As for kicking over the traces, sowing wild oats and that sort of thing, there was nothing in it for him. Give him Friend Wife.

He stopped at the florist's and, having paid a bill of thirty-six dollars for Georgie's flowers, purchased a double bunch of violets and carried them home with him. Abigail was watching for him out of the window. Something warm rushed to his heart at the sight of her. Through the lace curtains she looked quite trim.

"Hello, old girl!" he cried, as she opened the door. "Waiting for me, eh? Here's a bunch of posies for you."

And he kissed her on the cheek.

"That's more than I ever did to Georgie," he said to himself.

"Why, Samuel!" laughed Abigail with a faded blush. "What's ever got into you?"

"Dunno!" he retorted gaily. "The spring, I guess.

What do you say to a little dinner at a restaurant and then going to the play?"

She bridled-being one of the generation who did such things with pleasure.

"Seems to me you're getting rather extravagant," She objected. "Still

"Oh, come along!" he bullied her. "One of my clients collected five thousand dollars this afternoon."

Tutt summoned a taxi and they drove to the brightest, most glittering of Broadway hostelries. Abigail had never been in such a chic place before. It half terrified and shocked her, all those women in dresses that hardly came up to their armpits. Some of them were handsome though. That slim one at the table by the pillar, for instance. She was really quite lovely with that mass of yellow-golden hair, that startlingly white skin, and those misty China-blue eyes. And the gentleman with her, the tall man with the pink cheeks, was very handsome, too.

"Look, Samuel," she said, touching his hand. "See that good-looking couple over there."

But Samuel was looking at them already-intently. And just then the beautiful woman turned and, catching sight of the Tutts, smiled cordially if somewhat roguishly and raised her glass, as did her companion. Mechanically Tutt elevated his. The three drank to one another.

"Do you know those people, Samuel?" inquired Mrs. Tutt somewhat stiffly. "Who are they?"

"Oh, those over there?" he repeated absently. "I

don't really know what the lady's name is, she's been down to our office a few times. But the man is Winthrop Oaklander-and the funny part of it is, I always thought he was a clergyman."

Later in the evening he turned to her between the acts and remarked inconsequently: "Say, Abbie, do I look as if I'd just had my hair cut?"

THE DOG ANDREW

"Every dog is entitled to one bite."-UNREPORTED OPINION OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION OF THE NEW YORK SUPREME COURT.

"Now see here!" shouted Mr. Appleboy, coming out of the boathouse, where he was cleaning his morning's catch of perch, as his neighbor Mr. Tunnygate crashed through the hedge and cut across Appleboy's parched lawn to the beach. "See here, Tunnygate, I won't have you trespassing on my place! I've told you so at least a dozen times! Look at the hole you've made in that hedge, now! Why can't you stay in the path?"

His ordinarily good-natured countenance was suffused with anger and perspiration. His irritation with Mr. Tunnygate had reached the point of explosion. Tunnygate was a thankless friend and he was a great cross to Mr. Appleboy. Aforetime the two had been intimate in the fraternal, taciturn intimacy characteristic of fat men, an attraction perhaps akin to that exerted for one another by celestial bodies of great mass, for it is a fact that stout people do gravitate toward one another—and hang or float in placid juxtaposition, perhaps merely as a physical result of their avoirdupois. So Appleboy and Tunnygate had swum into each other's spheres of influence, either blown by the dallying winds of chance or drawn by some mys

terious animal magnetism, and, being both addicted to the delights of the soporific sport sanctified by Izaak Walton, had raised unto themselves portable temples upon the shores of Long Island Sound in that part of the geographical limits of the Greater City known as Throggs Neck.

Every morn during 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