Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories

								

eyes, took down her writing materials. On one side of a post card she
wrote the address of Alexis Bowinski, and on the other she penned in
her cramped neat writing, one line:
"Her name is Lois Chalmers. Hotel LeRoy."
This done she unpacked her basket, put her half dozen carnations in a
tumbler of water and carried them into the dark parlor, pulled her chair
up to the kitchen table, drew the lamp closer and patiently went back to
her buttonholes.

A DARLING OF MISFORTUNE

A shabby but joyous citizen of the world at large was Mr. Phelan
Harrihan, as, with a soul wholly in tune with the finite, he half sat
and half reclined on a baggage-truck at Lebanon Junction. He wag
relieving the tedium of his waiting moments by entertaining a critical
if not fastidious audience of three.
Beside him, with head thrust under his ragged sleeve, sat a small and
unlovely bull-terrier, who, at each fresh burst of laughter, lifted a
pair of languishing eyes to the face of his master, and then manifested
his surplus affection by ardently licking the buttons on the sleeve of
the arm that encircled him.
It was a moot question whether Mr. Harrihan resembled his dog, or
whether his dog resembled him. That there was a marked similarity
admitted of no discussion. If Corp's nose had been encouraged and his
lower jaw suppressed, if his intensely emotional nature had been under
better control, and his sentimentality tempered with humor, the analogy
would have been more complete. In taste, they were one. By birth,
predilection, and instinct both were philosophers of the open,
preferring an untrammeled life in Vagabondia to the collars and
conventions of society. Both delighted in exquisite leisure, and spent
it in pleased acquiescence with things as they are.
Some twenty-five years before, Phelan had opened his eyes upon a
half-circle of blue sky, seen through the end of a canvas-covered wagon
on a Western prairie, and having first conceived life to be a
free-and-easy affair on a long, open road, he thereafter declined to
consider it in any other light.
The only break in his nomadic existence was when a benevolent old
gentleman found him, a friendless lad in a Nashville hospital, cursed
him through a fever, and elected to educate him. Those were years of
black captivity for Phelan, and after being crammed and coached for what
seemed an interminable time, he was proudly entered at the University,
where he promptly failed in every subject and was dropped at the
mid-year term.
The old gentleman, fortunately, was spared all disappointment in regard
to his irresponsible protégé, for he died before the catastrophe,
leaving Phelan Harrihan a legacy of fifteen dollars a month and the
memory of a kind, but misguided, old man who was not quite right in his
head.
Being thus provided with a sum more than adequate to meet all his
earthly needs, Phelan joyously abandoned the straight and narrow path of
learning, and once more betook himself to the open road.