[FOOTNOTE 11: Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) wrote novels set in exotic locations. His best known work is _King Solomon's Mines_ (1885). Lew Dockstader had one of the last major travelling minstrel companies and was its principal comedian. Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst (1842-1933), pastor of New York's Madison Square Presbyterian Church from 1880 to 1919, was noted for his denunciations of vice and governmental corruption. He was instrumental in the campaign against Tammany Hall.] "Now, I give you my own recipe for inveigling a woman into that state of affairs when she can be referred to as '_née_ Jones.' Learn how to pick up her hand and hold it, and she's yours. It ain't so easy. Some men grab at it so much like they was going to set a dislocation of the shoulder that you can smell the arnica and hear 'em tearing off bandages. Some take it up like a hot horseshoe, and hold it off at arm's length like a druggist pouring tincture of asafoetida in a bottle. And most of 'em catch hold of it and drag it right out before the lady's eyes like a boy finding a baseball in the grass, without giving her a chance to forget that the hand is growing on the end of her arm. Them ways are all wrong. "I'll tell you the right way. Did you ever see a man sneak out in the back yard and pick up a rock to throw at a tomcat that was sitting on a fence looking at him? He pretends he hasn't got a thing in his hand, and that the cat don't see him, and that he don't see the cat. That's the idea. Never drag her hand out where she'll have to take notice of it. Don't let her know that you think she knows you have the least idea she is aware you are holding her hand. That was my rule of tactics; and as far as Paisley's serenade about hostilities and misadventure went, he might as well have been reading to her a time-table of the Sunday trains that stop at Ocean Grove, New Jersey. "One night when I beat Paisley to the bench by one pipeful, my friendship gets subsidised for a minute, and I asks Mrs. Jessup if she didn't think a 'H' was easier to write than a 'J.' In a second her head was mashing the oleander flower in my button-hole, and I leaned over and--but I didn't. "'If you don't mind,' says I, standing up, 'we'll wait for Paisley to come before finishing this. I've never done anything dishonourable yet to our friendship, and this won't be quite fair.' "'Mr. Hicks,' says Mrs. Jessup, looking at me peculiar in the dark, 'if it wasn't for but one thing, I'd ask you to hike yourself down the gulch and never disresume your visits to my house.' "'And what is that, ma'am?' I asks. "'You are too good a friend not to make a good husband,' says she. "In five minutes Paisley was on his side of Mrs. Jessup.