A tapeworm would have some advantage over a surviving sojourner beneath Mrs. H. Spicer's roof because the tapeworm never can tell in advance what it is going to have for its chief meal for the day, whereas if you were hardy and lasted through the second week at Spicer's, you knew that Monday's dinner would be based on the solid buttresses of corned beef and cabbage, and Tuesday's on lamb stew with cole-slaw on the side, and Wednesday's on liver and bacon, and so on through to Sunday's crowning feast, which was signalized by chicken fricassee accompanied by a very durable variety of flour dumpling with fig ice-cream for dessert; then repeat again in serial order, as named. It was Mrs. Spicer's brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly said--behind her back, of course--that if this was home he knew now why so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line. This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other members of her constantly changing family groups--a kind of soothing yet a fluttering air--the landlady piloted him to the small table for four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still lingered at it--Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield--and assigned him to the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl, to bring him some dinner. Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers--a vast number of them--command favorable attention and have a money value. The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there. After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in the sun--as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.