Before I went to sleep I'd located my victim. First thing in the morning I went and told mother all about it. You know I'm medium enthusiastic over what I'm going to do, so I was laying it off to her in great shape, when I brought up short, seeing her eyes full of tears. I plumped down and hugged her.

"What's the matter? I didn't mean to make you cry," I says, feeling it was my luck to do the wrong thing, and not half try.

"I'm not crying, little boy," she says; "I'm only one of those ladies in the books who don't want their true-loves to go to war." She kissed me. We often used to play parts of those books, so I took it just as she said, thinking it astonishing how well she acted the part; not much realizing what it meant to a mother who loved her boy, and knew he meant no harm, to have him clubbed all the time. But she shook off the tears right away.

"Arise!" says she, laughing, and putting a flower in my coat. "Arise, Sir William of the Hot Heart! Go thy way and conquer."

So I giggled and looked simple, give her one of them boys' kisses that would come under the head of painful operations to anybody but a mother, and skipped, as graceful as legs four foot long would permit, to my new job.

III

SANDY GRAY

The saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," oughtn't to be taken too literal. For instance, if Foster was sick abed, nothing could please him more than reading about how Professor So-and-so had mixed a little of this acid and a squirt of that other truck, and found out what his highly esteemed friend Herr Doctor Professor Schmittygeshucks said about the results wasn't true at all. And such thrilling stories. Week on end you could feed Fos that and keep him happy. Now, when Fos boiled this stuff down to my understanding, I was interested, too; but, right off the bat, I shouldn't care for it if I was sick. I'd rather hear something about the beauteous maid and her feller. Or a tune on the guitar. Or a little chin concerning the way Baldy Smith tried to play six cards in a jack-pot, and what happened to Baldy almost instantly afterward. No, sir, you can't stick too close to doing what you'd like to have done to you, because tastes differ.

The foundation on which I put my plan for increasing human happiness was the queerest little cuss you ever did see. A kid about twelve years old, who looked to be a hundred and ten even before Sammy Perkins shot 

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