string that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the
person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in the eye,
and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying to kiss a man
with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a family I shall carve
turkeys with a corn sheller.

"But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink?" asked the grocery
man.

"O, everything broke him up. He is split up so Ma buttons the top of his
pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider. Well, he had no business
to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in
North America, when he was a boy. He said he skated once from Albany to
New York in an hour and eighty minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was
such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates
and enter him as the 'great unknown,' and clean out the whole gang. We
told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice
skates, and that maybe he couldn't skate on them, but he said it didn't
make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he
would just paralyze the whole crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates
for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters
glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa
looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of
forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn't skate with them we would
take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust
a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the
middle of the room, and he said, 'leggo,' and we just give him a little
push to start him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you'd a dide to have
seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can't stick in your heel and stop, like