promised always to do something to run him off by ten o'clock. Every man knows how to do these things, I believe, such as taking off his shoes loud and telling mother to wind the clock, in a stagey voice, and making a great racket around the front door. And when the young man would hear these signs he would leave.

Right in the midst of Ann Lisbeth's visit one day she got a telegram from Doctor Gordon saying that he was coming down that evening and leave on the midnight train. This is a sure sign a man cares. He couldn't stand it any longer. Well this Mr. W. (I'll call him that for fear his grandchildren might feel hard toward mine if it ever got to their ears that I had spelt his name right out) had said he was coming over that night to bring some new records for the talking machine, to try them; but, when Ann Lisbeth told mother about Doctor Gordon coming, mother telephoned him, Mr. W., I mean, not to come till the next night when father would be at home, as he wanted to hear the records.

Sure enough father did have some business out in the country that afternoon and didn't get home until about ten o'clock that night. He heard voices as he passed the parlor door, and thinking of course it was Mr. W., decided that he would run him off right away so poor Ann Lisbeth could get some sleep.

Mother was already asleep and there was no way for him to know who it really was in the parlor, so he took his shoes off and slammed them down in vain, and rattled out the ashes, and wound the clock, and coughed and sneezed. By this time he was awfully sleepy, for it was a cold night and he had had a long drive, so he went to bed and to sleep.

Along about twelve o'clock father woke up, and seeing a light still in the parlor, tried to get mother roused up long enough to ask her what else she supposed he might use besides dynamite to run that fellow off. Mother was still so sleepy that she didn't say anything, so father got out of bed and opened his bedroom door. There were voices talking very easy in the parlor, so father, thinking that surely Ann Lisbeth would be ready to commit suicide by this time, decided he would walk to the front door and open and shut it real loud, knowing that would run him off, without waiting to slip on his trousers.

Now, father is long and lank, and wears old-timey bob-tail night-shirts, winter and summer; and all the rooms of our house open square into that one big hall—and there are no curtains to hide behind!

Just as father reached the front door and began tampering with the lock, out walked the happy pair from the parlor and they must have had a mighty tumble off of Mount Olympus or Pegasus, or whatever that place is called. They jumped back as quickly as they could, but of course they couldn't get back quickly enough to suit all parties concerned.

Father finally got the door open and, to keep from having to pass the parlor door again, he ran clear around that big, rambling house, bare-footed, and with the February moon shining down on him and the February wind whistling through his little bob-tail night-shirt.

The noise of so many doors opening and shutting made mother wake up in a hurry, and, being used to father's ways of leaping, then looking afterward, she realized what had happened.

Poor father came around to the side porch and scratched on the bedroom door for mother to let him in. By this time she was so near dead from laughing that she could hardly speak, but managed to use her voice a little, just to pay him back for doing such an idiotic thing, she said.

She opened the bedroom door a little, so Doctor Gordon and Ann Lisbeth could hear, then called out in a loud, distressed voice:

"Oh, Dan! Have you come home in that condition again?"

Everybody that knows father knows that he never drank a drop of anything stronger than soothing-syrup in his life; and when he had met Doctor Gordon in the city they hadn't been able to get off the subject of prohibition, they both were so temperate. It was a terrible thing to be called "in that condition" before him!

But mother let him in, and Doctor Gordon caught his train back to the city where he sent father at least two dozen funny post-cards on the subject of "that condition."

CHAPTER III

I always did admire surprises, my diary, so when mother came in from the station one day not long ago and said there was a surprise for me I thought sure it must be a dessert for dinner, or a package come by express, as it isn't Christmas for anything to be in the toe of my stocking. But mother shook her head and smiled at all of these. She said it was a heap better, and it is.

A curious thing has happened in this family. It's happened a little to father, for he's kept awake by it; a good deal to mother, for she has to tell how to tend to it; an awful lot to Dilsey, for she has to walk it and feed it and get it to sleep; but it has happened most of all to Bertha, for it's to her that the stork (or the doctor, or out of the rose bush—they tell you so many different tales you never know which to believe) brought it. Just about that time Bertha happened not to be feeling very well, so mother wrote for her to come down to our house where the air would be good for her, and then she would have Dilsey to tend to it. You'd never guess what it is, my diary, so I'll tell you. It's a baby! A live one with open and shut eyes, and can cry; you don't have to pull a string to make it, either. This makes it better than even the finest doll, and, as I'm above dolls anyhow, a baby is more suitable to one of my age. The only bad part about it is that you can't lock it up in the wardrobe when you get through playing with it. Sometimes I have wished it was the kind you had to pull a string to make cry, and then I'd cut the string off so we would have a few peaceful nights, but apt as not this wouldn't be healthy for it, for I guess the stork (or the doctor, or out of the rose bush) knew best how to fix it.

Mr. Parkes is the baby's father, and also Bertha's husband. He is one of the nicest men you ever saw, pleasant all the time, which people say is because he's a drummer which sells things. He carries valises full of lovely crackers and little cakes with icing on the top, and calls it his "line." I've heard Rufe and Cousin Eunice talk about "lines falling in pleasant places," and I think it must mean something like this, for our house has been a pleasant place since Saturday night when he came to spend Sunday with us and Bertha. Some days he sells as much as five hundred dollars worth of cake to one man, though I don't see what keeps him from dying that bought them of stomach ache, for I've had it myself since he's been here considerable. He and father talk a heap about Mr. Parkes' "house" in the city. He writes to the house every day and it writes back to him, and he is always saying what he'll do "when he hears from the house," just like it was folks.

He wears an elk's head on the lapel of his coat for an ornament and another on his watch chain, and even has a pair of purple socks with white elks on them, and laughs a good deal, which has been a benefit to Bertha's disposition since she married him. If the baby wakes up and cries for her bottle as late as eleven o'clock at night, which would give most men room to say things, he's just as jolly as if it was broad daylight, and says so loud you can hear him in the next room: "Tonsound her little skin! Her is her daddy's own