“Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter that you received to-night?”

“Fire away!” said his bride.

“Word for word,” said Gilbert, “it was this:  ’My dear Miss Warren—­You were right about the flower.  It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.’”

“All right,” said Nevada.  “But let’s forget it.  The joke’s on Barbara, anyway!”

THIMBLE, THIMBLE

These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting: 

You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the Moneygrubber Tribe.  Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron.  In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret & Carteret.  The factory where they make the mill supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn.  Those commodities—­to say nothing of Brooklyn—­not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher.  So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret’s office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question—­mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.

First, biography (but pared to the quick) must intervene.  I am for the inverted sugar-coated quinine pill—­the bitter on the outside.

The Carterets were, or was (Columbia College professors please rule), an old Virginia family.  Long time ago the gentlemen of the family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had slaves to burn.  But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. (Of course you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the “et” after “Carter.”) Well, anyhow: 

In digging up the Carteret history I shall not take you farther back than the year 1620.  The two original American Carterets came over in that year, but by different means of transportation.  One brother, named John, came in the Mayflower and became a Pilgrim Father.  You’ve seen his picture on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss.  Blandford Carteret, the other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast, and became an F.F.V.  John became distinguished for piety and shrewdness in business; Blandford for his pride, juleps; marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations.