But when a boy is put at a work-bench at twelve years of age and does the same thing day in and day out for seven long years, he may have lost all of the things that youth holds dear, but one thing he is apt to have learned, a dogged, plodding, unquestioning patience that shoves silently along at the appointed task until the work is done.

By midnight all the rents were mended and a large new patch adorned each elbow.  The patches, to be sure, were blue, and the coat was black, but the stitches were set with mechanical regularity.  Joe straightened his aching shoulders and held the garment at arm’s length with a smile.  It was his first votive offering at the shrine of love.

The effect of Joe’s efforts were prompt and satisfactory.  The next day being Sunday, he spent the major part of it in passing and repassing the house on the corner, only going home between times to remove the mud from his shoes and give an extra brush to his hair.  The girl, meanwhile, was devoting her day to sweeping off the front pavement, a scant three feet of pathway from her steps to the wooden gate.  Every time Joe passed she looked up and smiled, and every time she smiled Joe suffered all the symptoms of locomotor ataxia!

By afternoon his emotional nature had reached the saturation point.  Without any conscious volition on his part, his feet carried him to the gate and refused to carry him farther.  His voice then decided to speak for itself, and in strange, hollow tones he heard himself saying—­

“Say, do you wanter go to the show with me?”

“Sure,” said the pink fascinator.  “When?”

“I don’t care,” said Joe, too much embarrassed to remember the days of the week.

“To-morrer night?” prompted the girl.

“I don’t care,” said Joe, and the conversation seeming to lauguish, he moved on.

After countless eons of time the next night arrived.  It found Joe and his girl cosily squeezed in between two fat women in the gallery of the People’s Theatre.  Joe had to sit sideways and double his feet up, but he would willingly have endured a rack of torture for the privilege of looking down on that fluffy, blond pompadour under its large bow, and of receiving the sparkling glances that were flashed up at him from time to time.

“I ain’t ever gone with a feller that I didn’t know his name before!” she confided before the curtain rose.

“It’s Joe,” he said, “Joe Ridder, What’s your front name?”

“Miss Beaver,” she said mischievously.  “What do you think it is?”

Joe could not guess.

“Say,” she went on, “I knew who you was all right even if I didn’t know yer name.  I seen you over to the hall when they had the boxin’ match.”

“The last one?”

“Yes, when you and Ben Schenk was fightin’.  Say, you didn’t do a thing to him!”

The surest of all antidotes to masculine shyness was not without its immediate effect.  Joe straightened his shoulders and smiled complacently.