“There... I wanted to do that before you went,” said Mrs. Watson, and slapped him across the face. And Ferdinand's soul registered once more the flavour of a damp dishcloth. “It's the second time a woman has slapped you to-day,” said Mrs. Watson. “Try and finish the rest of the day without getting a third one. You can go now.” Ferdinand went. He reached the street, and walked several blocks in silence. Neither his voice nor his assurance seemed to be inclined to return to him speedily. His voice came back first, with a little of his complacence, after fifteen or twenty minutes. And: “Hell!” said Ferdinand, in his rich, harplike voice, running his fingers through his tawny hair. “Hell!” HOW HANK SIGNED THE PLEDGE _AUTHOR'S NOTE--Another version of this story appeared in a book entitled “Danny's Own Story,” published in 1912 by Doubleday, Page & Co._ I'm not so sure about Prohibition and pledges and such things holding back a man that has got the liquor idea in his head. If meanness is in a man, it usually stays in him, in spite of all the pledges he signs and the promises he makes. About the meanest man I ever knew was Hank Walters, a blacksmith in a little town in Illinois, the meanest and the whiskey-drinkingest. And I had a chance to know him well, for he and his wife Elmira brought me up. Somebody left me on their doorstep in a basket when I was a baby, and they took me in and raised me. I reckon they took me in so they could quarrel about me. They'd lived together a good many years and quarrelled about everything else under the sun, and were running out of topics to row over. A new topic of dissension sort of briskened things up for a while. Not having any kids of his own to lick, Hank lambasted me when he was drunk and whaled me when he was sober. It was a change from licking his wife, I suppose. A man like Hank has just naturally got to have something he can cuss around and boss, so as to keep himself from finding out he don't amount to anything... although he must have known he didn't, too, way down deep in his inmost gizzards. So I was unhappy when I was a kid, but not knowing anything else I never found out exactly how unhappy I was. There were worse places to live in than that little town, and there was one thing in our house that I always admired when I was a kid. That was a big cistern. Most people had their cisterns outside their houses, but ours was right in under our kitchen floor, and there was a trap door with leather hinges opened into it right by the kitchen stove. But that wasn't why I was so proud of it. It was because the cistern was full of fish--bullheads and redhorse and sunfish and pickerel.