Page:1880. A Tramp Abroad.djvu/236

 out of the deep grave in my memory where he had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years. When I was a boy in a printing office in Missouri, a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad, countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day, and without removing his hands from the depths of his trowsers pockets or taking off his faded ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken brim hung limp and ragged about



his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf, stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said with composure,

"Whar's the boss?"

"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.

"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 't ain't likely?"

"Well, I don't know. Would you like to learn it?"