"Why, confound you, what do you mean by telling me I don't know my own business?"
"I was only fooling, Mr. Butters. You did say the 'e,' of course."
"You're a liar!" he promptly answered. "I didn't say the 'e,' and you know it!"
He broke off into a roar of triumphant laughter, but well I knew who had won the day. He was mine—he and "The Pide Bull," and the story of his wife's uncle's old yellow rooster, and the twenty legends of Tommy Rice, the sexton, who "stuttered in his walk, by George!"—yes, and the famous narrative of how Mr. Butters thrashed the barkeep—all, all his darling memories were mine till sunset if I chose to listen.
He took me to luncheon at the Palace Hotel near by his shop, and afterwards mellowed perceptibly over his pipe, as we sat together in the clutter of paper about his desk waiting for the one-o'clock whistle to blow him to work again.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Eighteen," said I, half ashamed I was no more.
"Beautiful age," he mused, nodding his head and stroking his warm, black bowl. "Beautiful age, my boy." He spoke so mildly that I waited, silent and a little awed to have come so near him unawares, and feeling the presence of some story he had never told before.
But the whistle blew one o'clock and he rose and put on his apron, and went back to his case again, talking some nonsense about the weather; and though I lingered all afternoon, he was nothing but the old, gruff printer, and never afterwards did I catch him nooning and thinking of the age he said was beautiful.