The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks were spattered with dutchman's breeches that fluttered like butterflies poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened, lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented. "Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?" asked Dick. "That isn't a conundrum; it's a philosophic question." "I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity," Ellery answered lazily. "But I like them," Dick pursued. "I like a great many more kinds of people than you do, Norris. You are narrow-minded. You want to associate only with the good and true and bathed." "Oh, I wish well to the majority of the race, but there are some that I do not care to eat with." Something in Ellery's voice made his friend turn and survey him. "You look tired. You're working too hard. Don't make the western mistake of thinking frazzled nerves mean energy." "That isn't my kind," Ellery smiled. "I'm all right. Let me spurt for a while. I got my position through favor, Dick, yours and Uncle Joe's. I didn't particularly deserve it, and I didn't know anything about the work; so, for your sake as well as my own, I have determined to make good. Friendship may give a fellow his chance, but it doesn't hold down a job, you know." "Pooh! You've made good already. A man can be tremendously experienced--for the West--when he's been at a thing a year. Look at me and my work." "What do you consider your work? Road inspector?" For, to tell the truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with Dick's year of dawdling around the streets. "My profession," Dick answered with oracular gravity, "is a combination of hard work and fine art. It requires both toil and genius. I think I may say, with all natural modesty, that I have shown great natural aptitude for it. My profession is making friends. I have made friends useful and ornamental, friends great and small, friends beautiful and friends the opposite--which reminds me of your previous question, city politics. Whom do you suppose I supped with last night?" "Whom?" "With the Honorable, or by courtesy dubbed Honorable, William Barry," Dick replied triumphantly. "'Piggy' Barry?" ejaculated Ellery, turning on Dick in surprise. "Alderman Barry? The boss?" "'Piggy' does somehow sound more appropriate than 'Honorable'," Dick said meditatively. "And is he one of the people you like?" questioned Ellery with unfeigned surprise. "For business purposes, yes. If I'm going to get into politics some day, it becomes me to cultivate local statesmen, doesn't it? I took the great man to the theater, or at least to something that called itself the theater, and I gave him an excellent supper afterward. He seemed to appreciate it and my society."