entirely when he unscrewed a mysterious metal compartment and the mainspring exploded in his face. Mechanically speaking, he got beyond his depth. He discreetly vanished and the Victrola sang not again. Nathan’s first quarrel of note with Milly resulted from the appropriation of the married sister’s home by the Richards tribe as an extension of their own. My friend made the additional discovery common to many men who have wedded Sex instead of Ladyhood, that he had also married the girl’s family. As soon as Milly had sorted out her Woolworth dishes and run up a thirty-dollar bill at the Red Front Grocery, she affected to demonstrate her housewifery by inviting all of that family to dinner,—Sunday dinner. And her family came. Great was the coming thereof. Nathan held a dim idea there had been various brothers and sisters in the Richards house across the “flats.” But that first Sunday dinner was a revelation—likewise the alarming quantities of food it required to satiate them. The Forge larder reasonably resembled “a land overflowing with milk and honey” before they came. After they had gone, that thirty-dollar commissary had been attacked as by a plague of Egyptian locusts. Nathan, however, had not begrudged the food. What bothered him most was their methods of assimilation. There had been little or no table etiquette at Johnathan’s house. But such as it had been, it was courtly beside the demonstration in “manners”, or lack of them, revealed at that first Sunday dinner as well as in many hectic repetitions. When the Richards tribe recovered from their awe of Nathan, discovered him quite a mortal being with two arms, two legs and a propensity to consume food at conventional intervals like themselves, they “pitched in.” The younger children squalled and fought over smaller delicacies. Two of them enjoyed a pleasing altercation with pieces of baked potato. Mother Richards held the baby against a moist breast and allowed the little barbarian to pull a plate of soft squash pie into her lap. This was lamentable but cute. Undoubtedly Nathan had pulled a plate of soft squash pie into his mother’s lap at “thirteen months.”