the man on the ground floor of my bedroom.

   "Excuse me! it felt like something wooden," I whispered, while I dashed madly for the smoker.

   From that day to this I have never been able to look a Pullman car in the face, and whenever anybody mentions an upper berth to me I lose my presence of mind and get peevish.

   If you have ever been there yourself I know you don't blame me!

   Do you?

   When my wife made the suggestion that we should give a Thanksgiving dinner to our friends in the neighborhood it almost put me to the ropes.

   You know I'm not much on the social gag, and to have to sit up and make good-natured faces at a lot of strangers gives me intermittent pains in the neck.

   "Why should we give them a dinner?" I asked my wife. "Aren't most of them getting good wages, and why should we kill the fatted calf for a lot of home-made prodigals?"

   "John, don't be so selfish!" was my wife's get-back. "There's a long winter ahead of us, and when we give one dinner to seven people that means seven people to give us seven dinners. Don't you see how our little plates of soup will draw compound interest if we invite the right people?"

   My wife is a friend of mine, so I refused to quarrel with her.

   "All right, my dear," I said, "but you must give the dinner one week before Thanksgiving."

   "One week before Thanksgiving!" my wife re-echoed, "and why, pray?"

   "Because this will give our guests a chance to recover from your cooking before the real day of prayer comes around, and by that time they will begin to think about you with kindness, perhaps."

   My wife stung me with her cruel eyes and went out in the kitchen where the new cook was breaking a lot of our best dishes which did not appeal to her.

   The name of this new cook was Ollie Olsen.

   Ollie was half Swede and the rest of her was deaf.

   When Ollie came to the house to get a job my wife asked her for her recommendations.

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