Gurgling yells of agony brought everyone in the house to his assistance. Naturally we had to be right there among the shock-troops, heedless of the nice new suit we were wearing for the first time. We dashed in and found our friend standing in front of the pipe into which he was vainly endeavoring to stick his thumb—mindful, perhaps, of the famous exploit of the little hero of Haarlem. We succeeded in prying him away, but our new suit never looked the same again. If we had had any sense we would have left him there till he was washed away. The trouble was that no one else knew where to shut off the water, and—well, we simply had to drag him away to do it.
The next day a battalion of plumbers, plasterers, and decorators did what they could to repair the damage to the house. It took them about a week. But our friend is still hopeful. He still thinks he is a mechanical genius wasted as a mere lawyer. Only the other morning we dropped into his office. He was laboriously trying to make a piece of black court-plaster about the size of a war-map stick to the back of one hand by holding it down with the bandaged thumb of the other. There was a lump on his forehead and one of his cheeks was badly scratched. But he was in excellent spirits.
"Tell you what, old man," he burbled in his enthusiasm, "there's nothing like being able to do the odd-jobs around the house. Why, only last night I went down into my workshop, and I——"
We wiped away a furtive tear. There is something very pathetic about a fine mind falling into such decay as this.
BUMPS AND A BROGUE
Bumps and a Brogue
As we were combing our hair somewhat hurriedly in our boudoir at 8.58 the other morning—we are supposed to be down at the office at nine—it was suddenly borne in upon us that we had a remarkable set of bumps on our head. We made this discovery by the simple and painful process of running into several of them with a large, sharp comb. We thereupon decided that a set of protuberances like ours should be measured at once by a competent phrenologist.
We had seen the Professor's notices in the "want-ad" departments of the local dailies; and our attention had been drawn to them by their diagrams of extraordinarily bumpy heads, and the peculiar line of language in which the Professor advanced his modest claims to be regarded as a benefactor of the human race and one of the greatest phrenologists of all time. Besides, the Professor's protuberance-parlors were on our way down to the office. They have a central location, so that phrenological patients can run in every now and then and have a new bump examined, we presume.
We read the handsome and dignified brass plate on the door, and we knocked a respectful knock. After two or three minutes of waiting we knocked again—less respectfully. After we had knocked several more times, with constantly diminishing respect and constantly increasing force, the door was opened by a blond and comely young woman who explained that the Professor's hours were from three to five in the afternoon, and from seven to eight in the evening—to accommodate people who might drop in on their way to the theatre, no doubt. Did we want a chart as well as a reading?