"Say, there's a queen down at the end of the room," one of them would
suddenly exclaim, and while the other brother was gazing eagerly in
that direction he would deliberately remove several of his men from
the board. But the other brother, who was not so balmy as he
looked, would occasionally discover this slight irregularity and
proceed to express his opinion of it by word of mouth, which for sheer
force of expression was in the nature of a revelation to me. It was
appalling to sit there and watch those two young men, who had
evidently at one time come from a good home, sit in God's bright
sunshine and cheat each other throughout the course of an afternoon
and lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally
discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had
secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with
many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the
pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf
balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my
weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my
instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the
protecting pages of a 1913 issue of "The Farmer's Wife Indispensable
Companion," where I managed to lose myself for the time in a rather
complicated exposition of how to tell which chicken laid what egg if
any or something to that effect, an article that utterly demolished
the moral character of the average hen, leaving her hardly a leg to
roost on.


_May 8th._ "Give away," said the coxswain to-day, when we were
struggling to get our cutter off from the pier, and I gave away to
such an extent, in fact, that I suddenly found myself balanced