"Full and graphic account of the hair-breadth escape of a great architect. Sit down, gentlemen, and listen to a tale that will clog your veins with dynamite and make goose shivers go up and down your spine. Here, Lonnegan, rest your immaculately upholstered body in this chair and tell us all about it. Put up your brushes, Mac; I'll help you wash 'em. Everybody draw up to the fire." (Here Boggs dropped into his own chair.) "The modern Moses is going to tell us how he was pulled out of the bulrushes and why he has an excuse for still walking around among his fellow-men instead of being tucked away in some comfortable cemetery on a hill under a mausoleum of his own designing.
"Ladies and gentlemen"—Boggs was again on his feet, a ring in his voice like that of a showman—"it is my especial privilege, and one of the greatest honors of my life, to introduce to you this afternoon the distinguished architect, Mr. Archibald Perkins Lonnegan, who——"
"Will you keep still!" cried Pitkin, putting both hands on Boggs's shoulder and forcing him into his chair. "Sit on him, Marny!"
Mac by this time had laid his palette on his painting table and had moved to the fire.
"You never told me anything about that, Lonny."
"Well, don't know that I did; 'twas some time ago."
"You're sure that you aren't really murdered, me long-lost che-ild?" whined Boggs in an anxious tone; these changes of manner, tone, and gesture of the Chronic Interrupter,—imitating in one sentence the newsboy, in another the showman, and now the anxious mother—were as much a part of his personality, and as much enjoyed by the coterie, despite their constant protests, as the bubbling good nature which inspired them.
"Feel that," said Lonnegan, tapping his biceps as he frowned at Boggs, "and you'll find out how much of a corpse I am."
Boggs' plump fingers squeezed the corded muscles of the speaker with the dexterity of a surgeon hunting for broken bones. Then he cast his eyes heavenward.
"Saved by a miracle, gentlemen. Thank God, he is still spared to us! Now go on, you fashion-plate! When, where, and in what part of your valuable and talented person were you almost murdered?"