Now, if you'll all join me at the bar,
we'll drink his health--on me.'" Thaddeus paused, and then he added: "I
imagine they're cheering yet; at any rate, if I have as much health as
they drink--on Haskins--I'll double discount old Methuselah in the
matter of years."
The next morning at breakfast the pale and nervous standard-bearer was
affectionately greeted by his mother-in-law.
"I've been thinking about those lamps all night," she said, after a few
minutes. "The trouble about the gate-posts is that you have three
gate-posts and only two lamps."
"Maybe they'd let us buy three lamps instead of two," suggested Mrs.
Perkins.
"Well, we won't, even if they do let us," observed Perkins, with some
irritation. He had just received a newspaper from a kind friend in
Massachusetts with a comic biography and dissipated wood-cut of himself
in it. "I'm not starting a concert-hall, and I'm not going to put a row
of lamps along the front of my place."
"I quite agree with you," replied his mother-in-law. "It occurred to me
we might put them, like hanging lanterns, on each of the chimneys. It
would be odd."
Thaddeus muttered two syllables to himself, the latter of which sounded
like M'dodd, but exactly what it was he said I can only guess. Then he
added: "They won't go there. I can't get a gas-pipe up through those
chimneys. It's as much as we can do to get the smoke up, much less a
gas-pipe. Even if we got the gas-pipe through, it wouldn't do.
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