Well, say, I've had lumps come in my throat once in a while before on some account or other; but I never felt so much like I'd swallowed a prize punkin as I did just then. Most night time! Course, you hear of lots of cases, and you know there's asylums where such people are taken care of and taught to weave cane bottoms for chairs; but I tell you when you get right up against such a case, a party you've known and liked, and it's handed to you sudden that he's almost in the stick tappin' class--well, it's apt to get you hard. I know it did me. Why, I didn't know any more what to do or say than a goat. But it was my next. "Well, well, Beany, old boy!" says I, slidin' an arm across his shoulder. "This is all news to me. Let's get over in the shade and talk this thing over." "I--I'd like to, Shorty," says he. So we camps down under a tree next to the fence, and he gives me the story. As he talks, too, it all comes back to me about the first time some of them boys from up stairs towed him down to the studio. He'd drifted in from some Down East crossroads, where he'd taken a course in mechanical drawin' and got the idea that he was an architect. And a greener Rube than him I never expect to see. It was a wonder some milliner hadn't grabbed him and sewed him on a hat before he got to 42d-st. Maybe that gang of T Square sports didn't find him entertainin', too. Why, he swallowed all the moldy old bunk yarns they passed over, and when they couldn't hold in any longer, and just let loose the hee-haws, he took it good natured, springin' that kind of sad smile of his on 'em, and not even gettin' red around the ears. So the boss set him to sweepin' the floors and tendin' the blueprint frames on the roof. That's the way he broke in. Then a few months later, when they had a rush of contracts, they tried him out on some detail work. But his drawin' was too ragged. He was so good natured, though, and so willin' to do anything for anybody, that they kept him around, mainly to spring new gags on, so far as I could see. It wa'n't until he got at some house plans by accident that they found out where he fitted in. He'd go over a set of them puzzle rolls that mean as much to me as a laundry ticket, and he'd point out where there was room for another clothes closet off some chamber here, and a laundry chute there, and how the sink in the butler's pantry was on the wrong side for a right handed dish washer, and a lot of little details that nobody else would think of unless they'd lived in just such a house for six months or so. Beany the Home Expert, they called him after that, and before any house plans was O. K.'d by the boss he had to revise 'em.