Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/393

 Keyts pronounced "Bon Ton" in his own fashion, but his contempt was ably and amply expressed.

"Sounds like one of them fancy names for a corset or a patent lamp," he complained. "It's this here summer business that done it. They swarm in here with their private hacks and their hired help all togged out till you'd think they was generals in the army, and they play that game of sissy-shinny (drop-the-handkerchief for mine, if I got to play any such game), and they're such great hands to kite around nights when folks had ought to be in their beds. I tell you, my friend, it ain't doing this town one bit of good. The idea of a passel of strong, husky young men settin' around on porches in their white pants and calling it 'passing the summer.' I ain't never found time to pass any summers."

The wanderer expressed a proper regret for this decadence. Mr. Keyts reverted bitterly to the Bon Ton market:—

"Good name for a tooth powder, or a patent necktie, or an egg-beater. But a butcher-shop!—why, it's a hell of a name for a butcher-shop!"

The wanderer expressed perfect sympathy with this view of the shop legend, and remarked, "By the way, whose big house is that with the columns in front, up where the Prouse and old Blake houses used to be?"

The face of Mr. Keyts became pleasanter.

"Oh, that?—that's Cal Blake's—Major Blake's, you know. He married a girl that come in here from