And I find that at home Uncle Dudley is rated somewhere between the fam'ly cat and the front doormat. Mr. Bennett don't exactly gag the old man and lock him in the cellar. He ignores him when he can, and when he has to notice him he makes it plain that he's standin' the disgrace as well as he can. "So you came over with the old sport, did you?" says Bennett to me. "Batty old duffer, eh? That comes of being a dead one for so long. Manages to hang on with the Corrugated, though, don't he? He'd better, too! I'm not running any old folks' home here." But it wa'n't to show off how he stood with his son in law that Uncle Dudley had lugged me along. He'd got so used to bein' dealt out for a twospot that he didn't seem to mind. He didn't claim to be anything more even at the office. It's his flower garden, out back of the house, that Uncle Dudley had got me 'way out there to see; and, while I ain't any expert on that line of displays, I should say this posy patch of his had some class to it. Anyway, seein' it, and findin' out how he rolls off the mattress at sunrise every mornin' to tend it, lets me in for a new view of him. It's this little garden patch and the son out West that makes life worth livin' for him, in spite of Son in Law Bennett. "Say, Dudley," says I, "why don't you work a combination of the two; go out where you can raise roses all winter, if the dope these railroad ads. sling out is straight, and be with your son too?" "I--I can't do that, just yet," says he, sort of hesitatin'. "You see, he hasn't seen me for twelve years, and since then I have--er--well, I've been slipping backward. He doesn't know what a failure I've made of life, and if I gave up here and went on to him--why----" "I'm on," says I. "He'd spot you for one of the down-and-outers. But you do get it rubbed in here good and plenty, don't you?" "From Bennett?" says he. "Oh, he is right, I suppose. He knows how useless I am. But we cannot all succeed, can we? Some of us must stay at the bottom and prop the ladder." One thing about Uncle Dudley, he had no whine comin'. He takes it all meek and cheerful, and so far as I could make out he's most as useful around the office as a lot of others that gets chesty whenever they think what would happen to the concern if they should be sick for a week. Anyway, there's frequent calls for old Dudley to straighten out this or that; but somehow he never seems to get credit for bein' much more than a sort of a walkin' copybook that remembers what other people don't want to lumber up their valuable brains with. Maybe it's the white mud guards, or his habit of lettin' anyone boss him around, that keeps him down.