As later he saw the big man walking slowly up the path Dennis touched his cap to Jack.
“Will ye pardon me pipe, Misther Burroughs, being that low in me mind I kinnot spake without it?”
Jack smiled.
“I am a bit low meself, Dennis.”
“Well, I had best out with it like a man, Misther Burroughs. I went to spake to me Nora and she said, ‘Dennis O’Sullivan, have ye lost the little bits o’ wits ye be blessed with? Not one foot do ye stir from your own country. Did ye not become an American citizen this five years back?’ And, shure, Misther Burroughs, ’twas true the word she spake!”
THE CAT CAME BACK
By Virginia West
Leonard Raymond was temperamentally a naturalist. Had circumstances not compelled him to make a living he would no doubt have been an Audubon, or a Gray. He spent his spare moments studying the habits of the living things about town, English sparrows, pigeons, stray cats, homeless dogs, and so forth. Old man Peterkin, whose wife kept the boarding-house at which Raymond was getting his meals, who did nothing but collect the board bills, grow fat, and hold the position of church deacon, had told him that the crows in the cupola of the Eutaw Place synagogue had been nesting there for eleven years. Raymond did not know whether to regard that as an interesting item about crows, or as evidence against Mr. Peterkin’s veracity. However, Mr. Peterkin and the crows have nothing to do with this story.
In the backyard of the Linden Avenue house in which he lived with his married sister Raymond raised flowers, and on Sundays and holidays he would often go to the country to study the wild flowers and the birds.
One summer evening he sat in the backyard among the flowers. He was hot and lonesome, the thermometer being close to ninety, the family being out of town, and no vacation for himself in sight. To-morrow, he reflected, he would return to his post of teller in the bank, and hand out more money than he would ever own in a lifetime; the day after he would do the same thing——