"To the best woman I have met in many days," he said, not mocking but
serious. "I was about to lie down and let the little birds cover me
with leaves." Then he glanced at the empty dish and smiled. "To buttered
pop-corn! Long may it wave!" he said, and emptied the glass.

Well, I found a couple of apples in my pantry and brought them out, and
after he ate them he told me what had happened to him. He had been a
little of everything since he left college he was about twenty-five had
crossed the Atlantic in a catboat and gone with somebody or other into
some part of Africa--they got lost and had to eat each other or lizards,
or something like that--and then he went to the Philippines, and got
stuck there and had to sell books to get home. He had a little money,
"enough for a grub-stake," he said, and all his folks were dead. Then
a college friend of his wrote a rural play called Sweet Peas--"Great
title, don't you think?" he asked--and he put up all the money. It would
have been a hit, he said, but the kid in the play--the one that unites
its parents in the last act just before he dies of tuberculosis--the kid
took the mumps and looked as if, instead of fading away, he was going to
blow up. Everybody was so afraid of him that they let him die alone for
three nights in the middle of the stage. Then the leading woman took the
mumps, and the sheriff took everything else.

"You city folks seem to know so much," I said, "and yet you bring a
country play to the country! Why don't you bring out a play with women
in low-necked gowns, and champagne suppers, and a scandal or two? They
packed Pike's Opera-House three years ago with a play called Why Women
Sin."

Well, of course, the thing failed, and he lost every dollar he'd put
into it, which was all he had, including what he had in his pockets.