Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/286

Rh roof. Ordered forty kegs from the brewery and hired a fancy mixer to sling together mild snorts, as he called them, for the ladies. They tell me that, when the band got to going good on the steps and the fireworks on the roof, even Beacon Street looked out the windows to see what was doing. There must have been ten thousand people in the street and not a soul but Hank and his wife and the mixer in the house. Some one yelled speech, and then the whole crowd took it up, till Hank came out on the steps. He shut off the band with one hand and stopped the fireworks with the other. Said that speechmaking wasn't his strangle-hold; that he'd been living on snowballs in the Klondike for so long that his gas-pipe was frozen; but that this welcome started the ice and he thought about three fingers of the plumber's favorite prescription would cut out the frost. Would the crowd join him? He had invited a few friends in for