side, and touched you on the other. But you can last longer if you jest
keep the system in mind a little. Remember what I say about the window
stuff."

Percival had listened to the old man's story with proper amusement, and
to the didactics with that feeling inevitable to youth which says
secretly, as it affects to listen to one whom it does not wish to
wound, "Yes, yes, I know, but you were living in another day, long ago,
and you are not _me!_"

He went over to the desk and began to scribble a name on the pad of
paper.

"If a man really loves one woman he'll behave all right," he observed
to Uncle Peter.

"Oh, I ain't preachin' like some do. Havin' a good time is all right;
it's the only thing, I reckon, sometimes, that justifies the misery of
livin'. But cuttin' loose is bad jedgment. A man wakes up to find that
his natural promptin's has cold-decked him. If I smoked the best
see-gars now all the time, purty soon I'd get so't I wouldn't
appreciate 'em. That's why I always keep some of these out-door
free-burners on hand. One of them now and then makes the others taste
better."

The young man had become deaf to the musical old voice.

He was writing:

"MY DEAR MISS MILBREY:--I send you the first and only poem I ever