“But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink?” asked the grocery man.

“O, everything broke him up.  He is split up so Ma buttons the top of his pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider.  Well, he had no business to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in North America, when he was a boy.  He said he skated once from Albany to New York in an hour and eighty minutes.  Me and my chum thought if Pa was such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates and enter him as the ‘great unknown,’ and clean out the whole gang.  We told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice skates, and that maybe he couldn’t skate on them, but he said it didn’t make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he would just paralyze the whole crowd.  So we got a pair of big roller skates for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased.  Pa looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn’t skate with them we would take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust a suspender.  Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the middle of the room, and he said, ‘leggo,’ and we just give him a little push to start him, and he began to go.  Well, by gosh, you’d a dide to have seen Pa try to stop.  You see, you can’t stick in your heel and stop, like you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out, and he began to turn sideways, and then he threw his arms and walked on his heels, and he lost his hat, and his eyes began to stick out, cause he was going right towards an iron post.  One arm caught the post and he circled around it a few times, and then he let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all across the room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws, though there wasn’t any straws in her polonaise as I know of, but Pa just pulled her along as though she was done up in a shawl-strap, and his feet went out from under him and he struck on his shoulders and kept a going, with the girl dragging along like a bundle of clothes.  If Pa had had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his ears, he couldn’t have slid along any better.  Pa is a short, big man, and as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on being pushed across a room by a girl.  Finally Pa came to the wall and had to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates in his neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he didn’t let go of her polonaise she would murder him.  Just then my chum and me got there and we amputated Pa from the girl, and lifted him up, and told him for heaven’s sake to let us