“Percy,” says the show kid. “But you better not call me that. I'd fight if I was called that out of the family. Call me Spike. What's your name?”
“Well, then,” says Freckles, “1 don't like mine either; mine is Harold. But call me Freckles.”
Spike says he wished he had more freckles himself. But he don't get much chance for freckles, he says; his mother takes such awful good care of all the complexions in their family.
“Well, then,” says Freckles, “I think your mother is an awful nice lady.”
Spike, all of a sudden, bursts out crying then and says how would Freckles like it if people wrote notes to his mother and was yelled at about her? And Freckles says how would he like it if he was the one was yelled at, and he never had any idea the lady was grown up and had a family, and he got to sniffling some himself.
“Spike,” he says, “you tell your mother I take it all back. You tell her I was in love with her till I seen her plain off the stage, and since I have seen her and her family plain, I don't care two cents for her. And I'll write her an apology for falling into love with her.”
Which he done it, then and there, in the moonlight, jabbing his fountain pen into his wart, and it read:
Dear Little Eva. Since I seen your husband and son I decided not to say anything about matrimony, and beg your pardon for it. This is wrote in my blood and sets you free to fall in love with who you please. You are older and look different from what I expected, and so let us forget bygones.
Yours truly,
H. Watson.