"It's no good tryin' to fool them lads. I got my lesson that time, if I'd just had sense enough to know it; but if you believe me, sir, I got caught again. (Eh, what's that? Have another piece of chicken.) It was when I went to Montreal to see about the lump in my jaw. Did ye hear about the trouble we had that year, summer of '87? Big crop, but frozen--forty-seven cents, by George, best you could do. Well, sir, didn't I take a lump in my jaw--just like you've seen in those mangy steers. It wasn't very big at first, but it grooved something awful. I got a bottle of Mason's Lump jaw cure, but it just peeled the hide off me, and the lump grew bigger than ever. The missus here got scared she was goin' to lose me, and nothin' would do her but that I'd have to go to Montreal to see Dr. Murray. Now, I've always heard that he's awful easy on poor men, but takes it out of the rich ones, so you can bet I went prepared to put up a hard-luck story. I wore a boiled shirt, goin' down, but you bet I peeled it off before I went to see him, and I told him a pretty likely story about livin' on a rented farm, and me with a big family, most of them sickly like their ma's folks. He seemed awful sorry for me and wrote down my name and where I lived, and all that, and by George, I began to think he was goin' to pay my way back or give me the price of a cow or somethin'. He husked out the lump quick enough, had me come at seven o'clock--that man gets up as early as a farmer--and when I came to settle up he says to me: 'Mr. Perkins, if I was you I wouldn't live on a rented farm any longer. I'd go on one of my own--the north half of seventeen there--what's the matter with that? My secretary tells me you own that and there's two hundred acres under cultivation, and then there's that quarter-section of yours just across the Assiniboine, where you keep your polled Angus cattle. It really seems too bad for you to be grubbin along on a rented farm when you have four hundred and eighty acres of your own--good land, too.' Then he laughed, and I knew I was up against it, and I tried to laugh, too, but my laugh wasn't near as hearty as his. Then he says: 'It do beat all how many poor men with large sickly families, livin' on rented farms, come here to see me; but'--says; he, gittin' close up to me, and kinda tappin' me on the shoulder 'did you ever hear about an angel writin' in a big book--writin' steady day and night? Well, says he, 'here's one of them books,' and he whipped over the pages and showed me my name, where I lived and all. 'Ye can't fool the angels,' says he, 'and now I'll just trouble you for an even hundred,' says he. 'I have had three workin'-girls in to see me about their eyes today, and I done them free. I was writin' for some one like you to come along and settle for them when he was settlin' for his own. I paid it without a kick, you bet. Don't it beat the cars? Eh? What?"