Judge Hippisley put up wide-open hands and protested: "Why, Bill, I--I just been wonderin' how I could get your daughter to make up with me. I been afraid to ask her for fear she'd just think I was toadyin' to her. I think she's the finest girl ever came out of Carthage. Do you suppose she'd make up and--and come over to our house to dinner Sunday?" "Let's ask her," said William, and they walked in at the door. XVIII Early one morning about six months from the first dismal Monday morning after William Pepperall's last bankruptcy, Serina wakened to find that William was already up. She had been oversleeping with that luxury which a woman can experience only in an expensive and frilly nightie combined with hemstitched linen sheets. She opened her heavy and slumber-contented eyes to behold her husband in a suit of partly-silk pajamas. He was making strange motions with his feet. "What on earth you doing there?" she yawned, and William grinned. "Yestiddy afternoon the judge was showin' me a new step in this Max Hicks dance. It's right cute. Goes like this." Mamma Pepperall watched him cavort a moment, then sniffed contemptuously, and rolled out like a fireman summoned. "Not a bit like it! It goes like this." A few minutes later the door opened and Ollie put her head in. "For Heaven's sake be quiet! You'll wake Prue, and she's all wore out; and she's only got an hour more before they have to get up and take the train for Des Moines." The old rascals promised to be good, but as soon as she had gone they wrangled in whispers and danced on tiptoes. Suddenly Prue put her head in at the door and gasped: "What in Heaven's name are you and poppa up to? Do you want to wake Orton?" Papa had to explain: "I got a new step, Prue. Goes like this. Come on, momma." Serina shyly took her place in his arms; but they had taken only a few strides when Prue hissed: "Sh-h! Don't do it! Stop it!" "Why?" "In the first place it's out of date. And in the second place it's not respectable." Then the hard-working locust, having rebuked the frivolous ants, went back to bed. "A" AS IN "FATHER" I For two years life at Harvard was one long siesta to Orson Carver, 2d. And then he fell off the window-seat. Orson Carver, 1st, ordered him to wake up and get to work at once. Orson announced to his friends that he was leaving college to pay an extensive visit to "Carthage" and it sounded magnificent until he added, "in the Middle West." A struggling young railroad had succumbed to hard times out there, and Orson senior had been appointed receiver. It was the Carthage, Thebes & Rome Railroad, connecting three towns whose names were larger than their populations. Since Orson had seemed unable to decide what career to choose, if any, his father decided for him--decided that he should take up railroading and begin at the beginning, which was the office at Carthage. And Orson went West to "grow up young man with the country."