"People don't want to see your clothes; they want to see you. If you feel obliged to, you can send your Sunday clothes around some day and let her look at them once for all. Keeping young is largely a matter of looking after your digestion and getting plenty of sleep. Its all foolishness for you to talk about growing old. Why, you are in the prime of life." "Hm! Yes. And why don't you tell me that I look real handsome, and that the girls are all crazy for me. You're an awful jollier, Mrs. Betty, though I'll admit that a little jollyin' does me a powerful lot of good now and then. I sometimes like to believe things I know to a certainty 'aint true, if they make me feel good." For a moment Betty kept silent, gazing into the kindly face, and then the instinct of match-making asserted itself too strongly to be resisted. "There's no sense in your being a lonesome widower. Why don't you get married? I mean it." For a moment Jonathan was too astounded at the audacity of the serious suggestion to reply; but when he recovered his breath he exclaimed: "Well, I swan to man! What will you ask me to be doin' next?" "Oh, I mean it, all right," persisted Mrs. Betty. "Here you've got a nice home for a wife, and I tell you you need the happiness of a real home. You will live a whole lot longer if you have somebody to love and look after; and if you want to know what you will be asking me to do next, I will wager a box of candy it will be to come to your wedding." "Make it cigars, Mrs. Betty; I'm not much on candy. Maybe you're up to tellin' me who'll have me. I haven't noticed any females makin' advances towards me in some time now. The only woman I see every day is Mary McGuire, and she'd make a pan-cake griddle have the blues if she looked at it." Mrs. Betty grasped her elbow with one hand, and putting the first finger of the other hand along the side of her little nose, whispered: "What's the matter with Mrs. Burke?" Jonathan deliberately pulled a hair from his small remaining crop and cut it with the scythe, as if he had not heard Betty's impertinent suggestion. But finally he replied: "There's nothin' the matter with Mrs. Burke that I know of; but that's no reason why she should be wantin' to marry me." "She thinks a great deal of you; I know she does." "How do you know she does?" "Well, I heard her say something very nice about you yesterday." "Hm! Did you? What was it?" "She said that you were the most--the most economical man she ever met." "Sure she didn't say I was tighter than the bark on a tree? I guess I 'aint buyin' no weddin' ring on the strength of that. Now, Mrs. Betty, you just try again. I guess you're fooling me!" "Oh no, really I'm not. I never was more serious in my life. I mean just what I say. I know Mrs. Burke really thinks a very great deal of you, and if you like her, you ought to propose to her. Every moment a man remains single is an outrageous waste of time." Jonathan grinned as he retorted: