“Well, now, madam,” he said, “if you propose to believe a durned little dollar-and-a-half clock before you’ll believe your husband, that’s all right; but I shall certainly think that I have not found the amiable spirit in this palace of love which I expected to find on my arrival.” And the threads of love popped, and the loom stopped for several hours. * * * * * An uncrowned old King went to his little palace one night under the influence of King Alcohol, as usual. His unhappy wife let him in at the door and burst into tears and said: “Husband, why do you come home every night in this drunken condition?” “Why,” he said, “my dear, you are so pretty that I jist naturally love to look at you double!” * * * * * Did you ever see a tramp tramping by and pausing at your door to beg a benediction—not of love, but of bread? What cared this wandering boy for love? His heart was in the grave; he was the “somnambulist of a shattered dream;” he was a romance in rags, a seedy poem, a tattered song, crumpled by the hand of fate and thrown into the waste-basket of oblivion. He halted at a farmhouse one rainy day and proposed to kill all the rats on the place for his dinner. “Very well,” said the farmer, “it’s a bargain.” He called his neighbors in to see the killing. The tramp ate for an hour, and when he had finished he called for a spade. Seating himself in the middle of the room, he raised the spade over his shoulder and shouted: “Now fetch on your rats!” He stopped at an old fellow’s door and told him he was a dentist, and smilingly proposed to put a good set of teeth in a fresh apple pie for nothing. * * * * * I saw love enter the gubernatorial door to plead for love one day, and the old mother sat and wept in the presence of the Governor, while the aged father told the story of a love that was wrecked long ago, a life that was ruined, and a lover that wandered away with the death wound in his heart. Then I heard him tell the story of a tramp whose journey had ended at last within the prison walls; and I went out with them and stood at the gate of hell. I looked in and saw the ghastly stripes of shame and the pallid faces of crime moving to and fro, laboring under the lash of justice and shrinking from the scorn of their fellow man. I entered and looked again; there was not a smile nor a single peal of laughter, but melancholy’s ghost of song still lingered behind the iron bars to comfort languishing love.