Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/114

100, and raise hell every time he knocks over a vase or busts a window. Say, would you believe it? they wanted to keep him there—yes, sir—make him refined. Not for me! 'His father's about all he can survive in those respects,' I says. What do you think? Wanted to let his hair grow so he'd have curls. Some dames, yes? I bet they'd have give the kid lovely days. 'Boston may be all O. K. for grandfathers,' I says; 'not for grandsons, though.'

"Then Jackson was set on Bar Harbor, and I had to be firm again. Darn it! that man is always making me be firm. So here we are. He said it was a camp, and that sounded good. But my lands! he wears his full evening dress suit for supper every night, and you had ought to heard him go on one day when the patent ice-machine went bad."

"My good gosh!" said Cousin Egbert quite simply.

I had now finished laying out his things and was about to withdraw.

"Is he always like that?" suddenly demanded the Mixer, pointing at me.

"Oh, Bill's all right when you get him out with a crowd," explained the other. "Bill's really got the makings of one fine little mixer."

They both regarded me genially. It was vastly puzzling. I mean to say, I was at a loss how to take it, for, of course, that sort of thing would never do with us. And yet I felt a queer, confused sort of pleasure in the talk. Absurd though it may seem, I felt there might come moments in which America would appear almost not impossible.

As I went out Cousin Egbert was telling her of Paris. I lingered to hear him disclose that all Frenchmen have