There were some other points that fitted me to blush unseen. When I was fifteen years old and my voice was changing, it struck a peculiar gait. It ran up and down about six octaves, to the tune of a five-finger exercise. I talked around town for a few weeks in a surprisingly new style, that reminded me of a boarder who came up to our place one summer from New York and undertook to show us how to ride a horse. When the horse got as fast as a spry walk the boarder would teeter up and down in the saddle as if he had been practicing on a spring bed and had kept a chunk of it in each hip pocket for elasticity. George Honkey, our druggist and censor of public manners, said it was the most insipid piece of equine pitty-patter he had ever seen on Main Street, and from the get-up-and-down of it, he guessed it must be the Episcopal ritual for horseback exercise. My vocal cords, while tuning for my lowly part in life's orchestra, for a day at a time would seem to stick to a decent tenor or drop to an impressive bass which would have fitted me to be a preacher, but a sudden attack of mumps, with measles complicating, pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal. An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as the machine moves swiftly, gives the same soft rasp--a prolonged "sizz." What chance had a man with women, handicapped as I was? And I have mentioned only a few minor matters, which have come quickly to mind, as I hastily pen this narrative of my adventures as the middleman in Jim's love affairs. And yet I had a true and noble heart, with a capacity for manly devotion as great as any ever advertised on Sunday in the "personal" column. I make this statement because a man in my position must take the stand in his own behalf, if any testimony is to be given for his side of the case. I am the only competent witness to my own virtues. In order to appreciate me, a woman would need to have a fine discrimination. My beauty might have been revealed to such a woman if she had concentrated by absent treatment on my lofty, self-sacrificing character, evidenced by my pursuit of the chaste in art and the sane in philosophy. But all hope had then well-nigh departed. I realized that there were inconsistencies in the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection. I was an example of the exception to the rule. Excluded, I became the last of my race. I was the last candy in the box--just as full of sugar as those that had been devoured, but condemned to rattle in solitude because, forsooth, chocolate creams are preferred to gum-drops. Chilled by a want of sympathetic appreciation while mingling with my fellows, I had gradually withdrawn to the scholarly cloisters of our fifth-story apartment, adjacent to the tin