Washy closed his mouth, then let it slowly open again.

“My dear!” Mr. McCall’s voice was alarmed.  “What is it?” His eyes had climbed up over his glasses and remained there.  “What is the matter?  Is anything wrong?”

“Wrong!  Read for yourself!”

Mr. McCall was completely mystified.  He could not even formulate a guess at the cause of the trouble.  That it appeared to concern his son Washington seemed to be the one solid fact at his disposal, and that only made the matter still more puzzling.  Where, Mr. McCall asked himself, did Washington come in?

He looked at the paper, and received immediate enlightenment. 
Headlines met his eyes: 

Good stuff in this boy. 
About A ton of it. 
Son of Cora Bates McCALL
Famous food-reform lecturer
wins pie-eating championship of
West side.

There followed a lyrical outburst.  So uplifted had the reporter evidently felt by the importance of his news that he had been unable to confine himself to prose:—­

My children, if you fail to shine or triumph in your special line; if, let us say, your hopes are bent on some day being President, and folks ignore your proper worth, and say you’ve not a chance on earth—­Cheer up! for in these stirring days Fame may be won in many ways.  Consider, when your spirits fall, the case of Washington McCall.

Yes, cast your eye on Washy, please!  He looks just like a piece of cheese:  he’s not a brilliant sort of chap:  he has a dull and vacant map:  his eyes are blank, his face is red, his ears stick out beside his head.  In fact, to end these compliments, he would be dear at thirty cents.  Yet Fame has welcomed to her Hall this self-same Washington McCall.

His mother (nee Miss Cora Bates) is one who frequently orates upon the proper kind of food which every menu should include.  With eloquence the world she weans from chops and steaks and pork and beans.  Such horrid things she’d like to crush, and make us live on milk and mush.  But oh! the thing that makes her sigh is when she sees us eating pie. (We heard her lecture last July upon “The Nation’s Menace—­Pie.”) Alas, the hit it made was small with Master Washington McCall.

For yesterday we took a trip to see the great Pie Championship, where men with bulging cheeks and eyes consume vast quantities of pies.  A fashionable West Side crowd beheld the champion, Spike O’Dowd, endeavour to defend his throne against an upstart, Blake’s Unknown.  He wasn’t an Unknown at all.  He was young Washington McCall.

We freely own we’d give a leg if we could borrow, steal, or beg the skill old Homer used to show. (He wrote the Iliad, you know.) Old Homer swung a wicked pen, but we are