Dike carefully closed one eye and focussed the other on her. "Haven't any little son--my mistake!" Then he turned the open gig-lamp on me and began again. "S'prised at you, John; little son is the most won'erful thing any father and mother could possess with the possible 'ception of a li'l daughter--ain't that so, Mrs. John? Little brother is all right, but don't compare with little son. Look at me, Mrs. John; can't ever have little son--when I think about it I could bust right out cryin'--Grief has made me almost hystalical, hystorical, hystollified--I mean, I'm nervous--lesh have drink!" "What's gone wrong, Dike?" I asked; "each minute you look more and more like Mona Lisa without the smile--what's the trouble?" "All your fault, John," he plunged on again. "Most bew'ful girl she was, Mrs. John; perf'ly bew'ful, with won'erful gray hair and golden eyes, perf'ly bew'ful girl. I told your husban' all about her--I made confession that I was madly in love with this bew'ful girl, and your husban' told me to go and propose to her and drag her off to a minister--and I did propose--my mistake. After I made my speech she said to me, this bew'ful girl said to me, 'That's all right; no doubt you do love me, but are you eugenic?' and I said, 'No, I'm Presbyterian.'" Dike paused to let the horror of the scene sink in and then he fell overboard again with a moist splash. "That bew'ful girl jus' glanced at me coldly--jus' merely indicated the door, that bew'ful girl, and I passed out of her life f'rever. Two days later I found out jus' what eugenic meant, and, b'lieve me, from my heart, my sincere regret is that I was not college bred before I met that bew'ful girl!" Saying this he grabbed a wine-glass from the table and held it close to his heart in order to illustrate the intensity of his feeling. The next instant a thick, reddish liquid began to flow sluggishly over the bosom of his immaculate white shirt and was lost in the region of his equator, seeing which Dike gave vent to a yell that brought the waiters on the hot foot. "I'm stabbed; stabbed!" groaned the startled jag-carpenter, clutching wildly at his shirt-front as the plate-passers bore him away to a haven of rest. "It's my clam cocktail," whispered Stephen to me; "I poured it in his wine-glass 'cause they was too much tobascum sauce in it for me!" "Brave boy!" I answered. "It was a kindly deed." Then we finished our dinner in all the refined silence the Saint Astormore so carefully furnishes. Dike's sad story of misplaced affection and an unused dictionary puts us wise to the fact that in these changeful days even the old-fashioned idea of courtship has been chased to the woods. It used to be that on a Saturday evening the Young Gent would draw down his six dollars worth of salary and chase himself to the barber shop, where the Bolivian lawn trimmer would put a crimp in his mustache and plaster his forehead with three cents worth of hair and a dollar's worth of axle-grease.