help; and the moment the surgeon took a grip on the candidate’s tooth and began to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one leg and howl with all the lungs he had!  It was enough to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous unanimous caterwaul burst out!  With so big and so derisive an audience as that, a suffer wouldn’t emit a sound though you pulled his head off.  The surgeons said that pretty often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out, after the open-air exhibition was instituted.”

Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death, death suggested skeletons—­and so, by a logical process the conversation melted out of one of these subjects and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.  When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri, a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day, and without removing his hands from the depths of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf, stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip against the editor’s table, crossed his mighty brogans, aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth, laid him low, and said with composure: 

“Whar’s the boss?”

“I am the boss,” said the editor, following this curious bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face with his eye.

“Don’t want anybody fur to learn the business, ’tain’t likely?”

“Well, I don’t know.  Would you like to learn it?”

“Pap’s so po’ he cain’t run me no mo’, so I want to git a show somers if I kin, ’taint no diffunce what—­I’m strong and hearty, and I don’t turn my back on no kind of work, hard nur soft.”

“Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?”

“Well, I don’t re’ly k’yer a durn what I do learn, so’s I git a chance fur to make my way.  I’d jist as soon learn print’n’s anything.”

“Can you read?”

“Yes—­middlin’.”

“Write?”

“Well, I’ve seed people could lay over me thar.”

“Cipher?”

“Not good enough to keep store, I don’t reckon, but up as fur as twelve-times-twelve I ain’t no slouch.  ’Tother side of that is what gits me.”

“Where is your home?”

“I’m f’m old Shelby.”

“What’s your father’s religious denomination?”

“Him?  Oh, he’s a blacksmith.”

“No, no—­I don’t mean his trade.  What’s his religious denomination?”

“Oh—­I didn’t understand you befo’.  He’s a Freemason.”

“No, no, you don’t get my meaning yet.  What I mean is, does he belong to any church?”