insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring your hands and your reading
eye. Don't let me go along making my new circle think I'm an utter dub.
Tell your father plainly that he can never in the world make a wholesale-
hardware-man out of you. Force him to listen to reason. What is one year
spent in finding out just what you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like
the devil; nobody does my things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your
old anthems and your old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt
from this hole at a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a
real bed instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two
wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own
breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you found
out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you would be
bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack up and
appear."

The delay in the posting of this appeal soon brought from Winnebago a
letter outside the usual course of correspondence. It was on a fresh sheet
and under a new date-line that Cope continued. After a page of generalities
and of attention to particular points in the letter from Wisconsin, Cope
took up his own line of thought.

"I had meant, of course, to look in on him within a few days,--no great
hurry about it. But on Sunday evening he wrote and asked if he might not
call round on me instead. My name is not in the telephone-book; neither, as
I found out, was his. So I used up a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a
stamp--just such as I am now using on you--to tell him that he might
indeed. I put in the 'indeed' for cordiality, hoping he wouldn't think I
had slighted _his_ invitation. On Monday evening he came round--I must
have reached him by the late afternoon delivery. Need I say that he had to
take this poor place as he found it? But there was no sign of the once-