twinkled some through the smoke, said to another:

"Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor's niece
who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her."

Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and
said:

"Well, I wasn't gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not
too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I
could never stand--just the color of yours, Hank--and when she got to
going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand
he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was
better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board
around like a country school ma'am, as she would if she had married me."

A dark haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a
countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden
decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a
what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon,
and said:

"Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went
out across the marsh to Kingsley's farm, after watermelons?"

Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he
asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago
preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. "Why,"
said he, "before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had
stung me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the