“We had a sad time at our house New Years.  Pa insisted on making calls, and Ma and me tried to prevent it, but he said he was of age, and guessed he could make calls if he wanted to, so he looked at the morning paper and got the names of all the places where they were going to receive, and he turned his paper collar, and changed ends with his cuffs, and put some arnica on his handkerchief, and started out.  Ma told him not to drink anything, and he said he wouldn’t, but he did.  He was full the third place he went to.  O, so full.  Some men can get full and not show it, but when Pa gets full, he gets so full his back teeth float, and the liquor crowds his eyes out, and his mouth gets loose and wiggles all over his face, and he laughs all the time, and the perspiration just oozes out of him, and his face gets red, and he walks so wide.  O, he disgraced us all.  At one place he wished the hired girl ‘a happy new year’ more than twenty times, and hung his hat on her elbow, and tried to put on a rubber hall mat for his over shoes.  At another place he walked up a lady’s train, and carried away a card basket full of bananas and oranges.  Ma wanted my chum and me to follow Pa and bring him home, and about dark we found him in the door yard of a house where they have statues in front of the house, and he grabbed me by the arm, and mistook me for another caller, and insisted on introducing me to a marble statue without any clothes on.  He said it was a friend of his, and it was a winter picnic.  He hung his hat on an evergreen, and put his overcoat on the iron fence, and I was so mortified I almost cried.  My chum said if his Pa made such a circus of himself he would sand bag him.  That gave me an idea, and when we got Pa most home I went and got a paper box covered with red paper, so it looked just like a brick, and a bottle of tomato ketchup, and when we got Pa up on the steps at home I hit him with the paper brick, and my chum squirted the ketchup on his head, and we demanded his money, and then he yelled murder, and we lit out, and Ma and the minister, who was making a call on her, all the afternoon, they came to the door and pulled Pa in.  He said he had been attacked by a band of robbers, and they knocked his brains out, but he whipped them, and then Ma saw the ketchup brains oozing out of his head, and she screamed, and the minister said.  ‘Good heavens, he is murdered!’ and just then I came in the back door and they sent after the doctor, and they put Pa on the lounge, and tied up his head with a towel to keep the brains in, and Pa began to snore, and when the doctor came in it took them half an hour to wake him, and then he was awful sick to his stummick, and then Ma asked the doctor if he would live, and the doc. analyzed the ketchup and smelled of it and told Ma he would be all right if he had a little Worcester sauce to put on with the ketchup, and when he said Pa would pull through, Ma looked awful sad.  Then Pa opened his eyes and saw the minister and said that