I leaned out of the window and said in very much the tone one would assume in talking to a wilful little dog,
“Now go home. Go right home. You may catch cold if you stay here. I can’t let you have a match.”
“Papa, if I caught cold ni’ like this I’d know wha’ do with it. Mos’ hot ’nough to ligh’ my pipe. Goo’ bye, papa. Mos’ unneighbourly, papa.” He rose from his seat and swayed down the walk until he came to the gate.
“Papa, I shut your gate for you. No har’ feelin’s, papa. Mos’ unneighbourly, but I shu’ your gate.”
And muttering and stumbling, he went along to his home.
Ethel, with an absence of logic that must have been due to the heat, lay awake for an hour in fear that the matchless man would set fire to the house in revenge, but we did not hear from him again.
Next morning I found a pipe in the grass not far from the gate. I said nothing about it to Ethel, but when opportunity offered I showed it to James and asked him if he knew whose it was.
“Looks like Sam Adams’s,” said he. “Yes, there’s S. A. scratched on the bowl.”
I knew Sam Adams (fictitious name) to be a hard working farmer of some thirty years of age, a young married man with an adoring wife and pretty baby and with a lack of tact that I have never ceased to wonder at I resolved to restore the pipe to him. I learned from Bert that once in a while he would go down to Grange Meeting and would stop on the way back for beverages that he did not need.
The opportunity soon offered itself. I was out walking by myself one Sunday afternoon and I came on him inspecting some buckwheat that was coming along finely.