Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/62

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN my coat to my arm, I strolled up and down the platform of the railroad station, elaborately exploiting that cigar cuddled all by itself in a vest pocket. Harry lifted the cigar the moment he saw it, put it in his mouth, but did not light it. When the train came the men of the company found seats in the smoker. Harry sat down beside a countryman and struck up a conversation at once, as he did at all times with the strangest stranger. The boy being something of an amateur gardener, he soon found a common ground of interest with the farmer.

At length Harry was reminded of the cigar. He borrowed a match from his seat mate and lighted up. On the sixth puff the cigar exploded like a Roman candle, directly into the farmer's whiskers, which began to resemble an illuminated Christmas tree.

The farmer leaped to the conclusion that Harry was a Smart-Aleck city fellow bent on making sport of a countryman, and our huge relish of the joke confirmed him in that suspicion. The most direct way of recovering his lost dignity that suggested itself was hammering the daylights out of young Davenport, and it took all of us to drag him off the boy.