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 matrimonial range. So it was six months before I saw Perry again.

“One day I was passing on the edge of town, and I see something like a man in a little yard by a little house with a sprinkling-pot squirting water on a rose-bush. Seemed to me, I’d seen something like it before, and I stopped at the gate, trying to figure out its brands. ’Twas not Perry Rountree, but ’twas the kind of a curdled jellyfish matrimony had made out of him.

“Homicide was what that Mariana had perpetrated. He was looking well enough, but he had on a white collar and shoes, and you could tell in a minute that he’d speak polite and pay taxes and stick his little finger out while drinking, just like a sheep man or a citizen. Great skyrockets! but I hated to see Perry all corrupted and Willie-ized like that.

“He came out to the gate, and shook hands; and I says, with scorn, and speaking like a paroquet with the pip: ‘Beg pardon—Mr. Rountree, I believe. Seems to me I sagatiated in your associations once, if I am not mistaken.’

“‘Oh, go to the devil, Buck,’ says Perry, polite, as I was afraid he’d be.

“‘Well, then,’ says I, ‘you poor, contaminated adjunct of a sprinkling-pot and degraded household pet, what did you go and do it for? Look at you, all decent and unriotous, and only fit to sit on juries and mend the wood-house door. You was a man once. I have hostility for all such acts. Why don’t you go in the house and count the tidies or set the clock, and not stand out here