"'Jeff,' says he, 'I thought you had lost them ideas of realism in
your art. Why should there be a lady? When they sell a lot of watered
stock on Wall Street would you expect to find a mermaid in it? What
has a matrimonial ad got to do with a lady?'

"'Now listen,' says I. 'You know my rule, Andy, that in all my
illegitimate inroads against the legal letter of the law the article
sold must be existent, visible, producible. In that way and by a
careful study of city ordinances and train schedules I have kept out
of all trouble with the police that a five dollar bill and a cigar
could not square. Now, to work this scheme we've got to be able to
produce bodily a charming widow or its equivalent with or without the
beauty, hereditaments and appurtenances set forth in the catalogue and
writ of errors, or hereafter be held by a justice of the peace.'

"'Well,' says Andy, reconstructing his mind, 'maybe it would be
safer in case the post office or the peace commission should try to
investigate our agency. But where,' he says, 'could you hope to find
a widow who would waste time on a matrimonial scheme that had no
matrimony in it?'

"I told Andy that I thought I knew of the exact party. An old friend
of mine, Zeke Trotter, who used to draw soda water and teeth in a
tent show, had made his wife a widow a year before by drinking some
dyspepsia cure of the old doctor's instead of the liniment that he
always got boozed up on. I used to stop at their house often, and I
thought we could get her to work with us.

"'Twas only sixty miles to the little town where she lived, so I
jumped out on the I. C. and finds her in the same cottage with the