the parlor and not be an insult to those present.

For awhile everybody sat around and sized up what everybody else
was wearing.

Then they gave each other the silent double-cross.

Presently my wife whispered to Miss Cleopatra Hungerschnitz,
whereupon that young lady giggled her way over to the piano and
began to knock its teeth out.

The way Cleopatra went after one of Beethoven's sonatas and slapped
its ears was pitiful.

Cleopatra learned to injure a piano at a conservatory of music, and
she could take a fugo by Victor Hugo and leave it for dead in about
thirty-two bars.

At the finish of the sonata we all applauded Cleopatra just as
loudly as we could, in the hope that she would faint with surprise
and stop playing, but no such luck.

She tied a couple of chords together and swung that piano like a
pair of Indian clubs.

First she did "My Old Kentucky Home," with variations, until
everybody who had a home began to weep for fear it might get to be
like her Kentucky home.

The variations were where she made a mistake and struck the right