“Well, Uncle Ike, you are the queerest man I ever saw,” said the red-headed boy, as he wiped a tear out of his eye with his shirt sleeve. “There is nothing I can do to agree with you, until you have talked to me a little. When I feel funny, and want to laugh, you make me cry; and when I get serious about something, and get you to talking, you get me to laughing. I never agree with you until you have had your say. But I agree with you on one thing; you said the other day, when we were talking about breach of promise, that you were never in love. That's where you and I are alike. It makes me weary to see some boys in love with girls, and run around after them, and make themselves laughing stock of everybody. If a girl should get in love with me, I would tell her to go to thunder, and I would laugh at her, and tell all the boys she was silly. There is no good in love. I thought I liked a girl once, and gave her a German silver ring that I got off an old china pipe stem; and she loved me just a week, and then she shook me because the German silver ring corroded on her finger and gave her blood poison. It wasn't true love, or she would have stuck to me if she had been obliged to have her finger amputated. Bah! I was so discouraged that I will never have anything to say to a girl again, and I will grow up to be an old bach like you, who never did love anybody but a dog. Isn't that so, Uncle Ike?” “Did I say I never loved any woman?” said Uncle Ike, as he looked away off, apparently his eyes penetrating the dim past, and a wet spot on his cheek that kept getting wetter, and spreading around his face, until he wiped it off with one end of his necktie. “Why, boy, don't you ever tell your ma, but I have been in love enough to send a man to the insane asylum. You think you will never love any girl again, on account of that blood poisoning. Why, blood poison is nowhere beside love. Some day you will have a girl pass to windward of you, and when cool air of heaven blows a breath of her presence toward you, the love microbe will enter your system with the odor of violets that comes from her, and there is no medicine on earth that will cure you. The first thing you know you will follow that girl like a poodle, and if she wants you to walk on your hands and knees, and carry her parasol in your mouth, you will do it. When she looks at you the perspiration will start out all over you, and you will think there is only one pair of eyes in the world, that all beautiful eyes have been consolidated into one pair of blue ones, and that they are as big as moons. If you touch her hand you will feel a thrill go up your arm and down your spine, as you do when a four-pound bass strikes your frog when you are fishing. She will see that your necktie is on sideways, and she will take hold of it to fix it, and you will not breathe for fear she will go away, and when she gets you fixed so you will pass in a crowd, you will be paralyzed all