I looked in on him one evening in late November. I found a house too emphatically furnished and a wife too concerned about making an impression. I did not consider myself a young man of prime consequence and did not relish the expenditure of so much effort: after all, Johnny's standing, Johnny's wife, Johnny's domestic _entourage_ were not before a judgment-bar. It was plain to see that for Mrs. John W. McComas complete social comfort had not yet been reached, and I wondered if the next move might not show it as farther away than ever. Johnny himself was bluff and direct, and took things as a matter of course. Much had been done, but more remained to be done; meanwhile all was well and good. After a little, his wife was content to leave us alone together, and we drifted to Johnny's "den"--a word new at that time, and descriptive of the only feature of his home on which he laid the slightest self-conscious emphasis. I had heard that there were twins--boys; and soon, as the evening was still young, I heard the twins themselves. They had reached the age of ten months, and consequently had developed wants, but no articulate means for making those wants known. Therefore they howled, and they began howling in unison now. Perhaps it was for them that a foresighted mother had left us alone together. "Great little hollerers!" said Johnny placidly, pulling at his pipe. I was still a bachelor. "Might shut the door?" I proposed. "If you like," said Johnny, without enthusiasm. "They wake me every morning at five," he added. Yes, I was still a bachelor--and probably a tactless, even a brutal, one. "Might move them to another bedroom, farther away?" I suggested. The house seemed big enough for such an arrangement. "Don't want to," declared Johnny. He began pulling at his pipe again, and there was a little silence during which I might meditate on the curt nobility of his remark. The fact was, of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too--they're mine as well as hers,"--such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves broke on his sensorium as ripples break on a granite coast. Perhaps they pleased him; perhaps they even soothed him. Why, bless you! these children were _his_! They were facts as great and as unescapable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as dawn and twilight, as the morning and evening stars. And the evening stars were singing together. Great may have been the jubilation for Johnny's ears, boundless the content in Johnny's heart.