“Well, wouldn't this skin you,” said the bad boy, as he took up a dried prune and tried to crack it with a hatchet on a two-pound weight, turning to his chum who was stroking the singed hair of the old cat the wrong way. “Say, old man, you ought to get a hustle on you. Why don't you clean out this shebang, and put in a new stock, of goods, and have clerks with white aprons on, and a girl bookkeeper, and goods that people will buy and eat and not get sick? There is a grocery down street that is as clean as a whistle, and I notice all your old customers go there. Why don't you keep up with the times?” “O, I ain't running a dude place,” said the old man, as he took a piece of soft coal and put it in the old round stove, and wiped the black off his hands on his trousers. “I am trying to get rid of my customers. I have got money enough to live on, and I just stay here waiting for the old cat to die. I have only got six customers left, and one of them has got pneumonia, and is going to die, then there will be only five. When they are all gone I shall sit here by the stove until the end comes. There is nothing doing now to keep me awake, since you boys quit getting me mad. Say, boys, do you know, I haven't been real mad since you quit coming here. The only fun I have had is swearing at my customers when they stick up their noses at my groceries. It's the funniest thing, when I tell an old customer that if they don't like my goods they can go plum to thunder, they get mad and go somewhere else to trade. Times must be changing. Years ago, the more I abused customers the more they liked it, and I just charged the goods to them with a pencil on a piece of brown wrapping paper. I had four cracker boxes full of brown wrapping paper with things charged on the paper against customers, but when anybody wanted to pay their account it made my head ache to find it, and so one day I balanced my books by using the brown wrapping paper to kindle the fire. If you ever want to get even with the world, easy, just pour a little kerosene on your accounts, and put them in the stove. I have never been so free from worry as I have since I balanced my books in the stove. Well, I suppose you have come home on account of your dad's sickness,” said the old groceryman, turning to the bad boy, who had written a sign, 'The Morgue,' and pinned it on the window. “I understand your dad had an operation performed on him in a hospital. What did the doctors take out of him?”