I met Johnny Black, and he was going to keep a date with a couple of swell heiresses at one of the hotel dining-rooms. I saw them on the street to-day, and they won't do. One of them wore an amethyst ring that weighed about sixty carats, and the other had on white slippers covered with little beads.
I don't know anything about them, but I'll gamble that they are the kind of people that have pictures of the family and wreaths in the parlor. They looked fine and daisy last night, though.
Probably the grape. My girl's name was Estelle. Wouldn't that scald you? Estelle handed me a lot of talk about having seen me on the street for the last two years, and how she had always been dying to meet me, and I got swelled up and bought wine like a horse owner. Johnny was shaking his head and motioning for me to chop, but what cared I? Estelle was saying, "He done it,""I seen it," and "Usen't you?" right along, but the grape stood for everything.
Estelle's friend was talking about her piano, and how hard it was to get good servants nowadays, and say, Jim, I've heard knockers in my time, but Estelle is the original leader of the anvil chorus. She just put everybody in town on the pan and roasted them to a whisper. She could build the best battleship Dewey ever saw with her little hammer. Estelle's friend, after much urging, then sang a pathetic ballad entitled, "She Should Be Scolded, but Not Turned Adrift," and I sat there with one eye shut, so that I could see single, and kept saying, "Per'fly beauf'ful."About this time I commenced to forget. I remember getting an awful rise out of Estelle by remarking that her switch didn't match her hair. She came up like a human yeast cake. Johnny sided with the dame, and said I might at least try to act like a gentleman, even if I weren't one. Perhaps the grape wasn't getting to Johnny by this time. He was nobby and boss. He was dropping his r's like a Southerner, and you know how much of a Southerner Johnny is--Johnstown, Pa.; and he was hollering around about his little three-year-old, standard-bred, and registered bay mare out of Highland Belle, by Homer Wilkes, with a mark of twenty-one, that could out-trot any thing of her age that ever champed a bit. Did you get that, Jim? That ever champed a bit;and still he said at noon to-day that he had had two, possibly three, glasses of wine, but no more. The only way that mare of Johnny's can go a mile in twenty-one is "In the Baggage Coach Ahead."Say, Jim, I've never said much about it, but you let any of these fellows who own horses get a soak on, and they get to be a kind of a village pest, with their talk about blowing up in the stretch, shoe blisters on the left forearm, etc. Now, since when did a horse get an arm? They have got me winging. I can't follow them at all.
But to return to last night. When Johnny threw that thing at me about champing the bit, it was all off to Buffalo with little Will. I went out of business right there.
When I got up this morning I had to ask the bellboy what hotel I was in. I'll see the fellows to-night, and they'll all tell me how dirty my face was, and what I called so and so, and make me feel as bad as they possibly can. It's a wonder a fellow doesn't get used to that, but I never do; I feel meaner each time. Guess I'll take the veil.
Don't fail to come down Saturday. Several of us are going yachting on the Ohio River. It will be lovely billiards.
Yours as ever, Billy.
P. S.--Do you know anything about that George's place?
Horse Sense Sometimes you eat too much, sometimes you drink too much, and sometimes you do both. In any event, you feel like the very old scratch the next morning. Too much liquor overheats the blood.
Too much food, and the liver goes on a strike. The first remedy which should suggest itself is a purgative which will act on the liver, and cleanse the system of all the indigestible junk with which it has been overtaxed. This is positively the foundation for permanent relief. The next thing is to cool the blood. Now, isn't it common horse sense?
Think it over.
The R--R-- is the only water which acts on the liver. It's base is sodium phosphate.
The R--R-- is the only water which cools the blood, Overheated blood is what causes the pressure on the head.
The R--R-- is the only pleasant-tasting aperient water of any strength on the market to-day.
We have stumbled onto a good thing, and we've got the money to push it.
You remember the man who at breakfast said: "Waiter, bring me about ten grains of oatmeal, and put stickers on it so that it will stay down; and say, waiter, please look as pleasant as possible, for I feel like h--l."Well, that's how a person's stomach gets some mornings.
If you are going to drink an aperient, why try to force down a water that is warm, and tastes like a lot of bad eggs, doesn't touch your liver, and won't cool your blood, when you can get the R--R--, cold and sparkling and pleasant, which will do all these things?
If you are annoyed with constipation, stomach or liver trouble, use as your system dictates, and see bow much better you feel.
It can't hurt you. Best before breakfast.
