afternoon, and Ma thinks he suspects that we played it on him. Say, you don't think there is any harm in playing it on an old man a little for a good cause, do you?” The grocery man said he supposed, in the interest of reform it was all right, but if it was his boy that played such tricks he would take an ax to him, and the boy went out, apparently encouraged, saying he hadn't seen the old man since the day before, and he was almost afraid to meet him. CHAPTER XXVI. HIS PA MORTIFIED--SEARCHING FOR SEWER GAS--THE POWERFUL ODOR OF LIMBERGER CHEESE AT CHURCH--THE AFTER MEETING--FUMIGATING THE HOUSE--THE BAD BOY RESOLVES TO BOARD AT AN HOTEL. “What was the health officer doing over to your house this morning?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth was firing frozen potatoes at the man who collects garbage in the alley. “O, they are searching for sewer gas and such things, and they have got plumbers and other society experts till you can't rest, and I came away for fear they would find the sewer gas and warm my jacket. Say, do you think it is right, when anything smells awfully, to always lay it to a boy?” “Well, in nine cases out of ten they would hit it right, but what do you think is the trouble over to your house, honest?” “S-h-h! Now don't breathe a word of it to a living soul, or I am a dead boy. You see I was over to the dairy fair at the exposition building Saturday night, and when they were breaking up, me and my chum helped to carry boxes of cheese and firkins of butter, and a cheese-man gave each of us a piece of limberger cheese, wrapped up in tin foil. Sunday morning I opened my piece, and it made me tired. O, it was the offulest smell I ever heard of, except the smell when they found a tramp who hung himself in the woods on the Whitefish Bay road, and had been dead three weeks. It was just like a old back number funeral. Pa and Ma were just getting ready to go to church, and I cut off a piece of cheese and put it in the inside pocket of Pa's vest, and I put another in the lining of Ma's muff, and they went to church. I went down to church, too, and sat on a back seat with my chum, looking just as pious as though I was taking up a collection. The church was pretty warm, and by the time they got up to sing the first hymn Pa's cheese began to smell a match against Ma's cheese.” [Illustration: Just as I am p131]