That winter all the kids in the country got to mixing things with measles and whooping-cough, and the like, so there wasn’t any dances or anything. Everybody stayed at home so they wouldn’t catch nothing, and then wondered where the dickens they’d caught it at. So times was dull, and there wasn’t nothing doing in the shape of amusement. One of us would ride into Bent Willow, once in a week or so, and glom all the papers and magazines we could. We’d just about finished the red and blue and green books—what hadn’t just about finished us, that is. So one day I rode in and brought out a bundle uh magazines—the kind that’s thirty cents a year, or only twenty if yuh get up a club uh four. Yuh know the brand all right, I guess. They have stories told in shifts, and every shift saws off short just when you’re plumb wild with desire to know how he rescued the beautiful Lady Floribel from the up-stairs of the burning manor-house, with the staircase just commencing to crackle up good; or some such a lay as that. And there’s pages in it that tells yuh how to be beautiful, and others that hands out wisdom on the momentous question of what it’s polite for a girl to say to the gazabo she’s been dancing with, after he’s tromped on her toes and took a chunk out of her dress; should she say, “Don’t mention it,” or shall she bawl him out before the crowd the way she’d like to? Ellis and I was playing pitch that night, and old Shooting-star had the bunch uh magazines, going through them methodical and serious. Shooting-star swallows everything he sees in print, like them writer sharps didn’t know enough to lie. And once in awhile he’d read a piece out to us. He went through the cooking page, licking his chops over the salads and truck, and wishing we wasn’t such a bone-headed bunch, so we could frame up some uh the things. “A woman could sure do it,” he says, kinda thoughtful. “But it’s no use either uh you tackling this here coffee frappy; but I’ll gamble it’s out uh sight. There’s times,” he says, “when a woman is about the best investment a man can make.” “If he don’t go and invest in ’em too heavy,” puts in Ellis. Shooting-star didn’t say no more then. But pretty soon he read out a little short piece that they stuck in between the advertisements. It said: A loveless life is a life barren of all joy, all contentment, all hope. Marriage broadens the life as nothing else can do; it rounds out character, makes for generosity and true sympathy. The man who is blessed with a true, loving helpmate need never fear the barren years of a lonely old age. Or if them ain’t just the words, they’re mighty near it.