“Bully fer you, ’s Gordon,” shouted the excited Moses leaping furiously. “Keep her goin’. Ole Dan Tucker jist fits that toon.”
“Shame on you Moses, rampagin’ an’ bellerin’ there like a gang of coyotes,” remonstrated his mother.
The strains of “Red Wing” having died away, Mrs. Wopp busied herself setting up the crokinole board. “Me and Par won’t play, jist the young folks,” she announced.
“Hurry Betty and set opposite me so’s we kin play together,” said Moses, unwittingly giving Cupid his innings.
“You’re a brilliant youth Moses,” smiled Howard approvingly, “and sure to get on in life. You don’t appreciate your own cleverness half as much as I do.”
Moses stared, wondering at this unusual compliment.
In the meantime Mr. Wopp sitting precariously on the edge of the sofa was examining for at least the two-hundredth time the red plush album which contained the records of the Wopp family, past and present, in picture form. He looked long and earnestly at a tin-type representing a plump, velvet-coated, mop-haired boy of twelve. He sighed deeply.
“I must of looked like that Lize or the picter couldn’t of been took.” Ruefully he rubbed his bald crown.
“The fleetin’ of youth is most sartin,” answered his wife, coining this epigram on the shortness of life’s spring-time, and sighing as she spoke. The good lady herself was looking through a stereoscope at some views and finding one of Niagara Falls she endeavored to cheer her despondent husband.
“Do you remember when we went to Niagary Falls on our weddin’ tower, Ebenezer? We seen this here whirlpool an’ Goat Island an’ the hull show. Them was the happy days.”