He encountered this spirit even at the foreman's house, where formerly he had loved to go. When he had first been employed at the office the foreman had chanced to send him to his dwelling for some forgotten article, and Bob Platt, who was a breezy, jovial soul and keenly relished a jest or quip with scant regard to its point or quality, if but it was merry, found much enjoyment in the account which he received of the country child's first encounter with a parrot, an honored member of the Platt household. Thereafter he encouraged Ned's presence there that he might himself have a laugh at the boy's overpowering astonishment at the loquacious accomplishments of the bird and his simple-minded horror of its profanity. "You see I ought to have sent it to Sunday-school when it was young!" Bob Platt seriously explained, and the new importation from the backwoods believed this at the time, as he would then have believed anything that Bob Platt chose to tell him, especially about that _lusus naturæ_, a bird that could talk and swear! Later he came to know Bob Platt as "a mighty kind man, but will have his joke!" This just appraisement was brought about chiefly through Mrs. Platt's interference to prevent the devil from being "bedeviled" beyond the point of comfort and good-nature. She would not permit his mystification about city ways and his implicit reliance on the gay fables invented by Bob Platt, which Ned would have accepted as if they were gospel truth. "Don't let him humbug you, Eddy!" she would interrupt warningly, at the very crisis of the fun. For Bob Platt was by no means "boss" at home! His ascendency ceased at the threshold of the composing-room. Mrs. Platt gave Ned good, sound information and admonition to counteract the wondrous stories of the foreman, which the credulous boy was prepared to swallow whole coming from that source, so great was his confidence in Bob Platt, and to say truth his serious-minded wife spoiled many a good and harmless joke. Mrs. Platt gradually became a genuine partisan of the lad. His kindly disposition was early appreciated by her. Indeed, only the day after he had first been sent there he had stopped on his way down town, for her neat home lay in a quiet cul-de-sac, with half a dozen other pretty cottages, opening off a genteel street between the dreary tenement region where he lived and the business portion of the city. After a neighborly country fashion he wanted to know if she had any "yerrands" which he might do for her on his way back, "bein' as you ain't got no boys, an' nothin' but girls," he explained sympathetically and with an expression of genuine pity.