“Mack,” he said, as that worthy anathematized a spiteful match, and then sucked his finger.

“Blast the all-fired old torch!” said John, wrestling with the lamp-flue, and turning on a welcome flame at last.  “Well, you said ‘Mack!’ Why don’t you go on?  And don’t bawl at the top of your lungs, either.  You’ve already succeeded in waking every boarder in the house with that guitar, and you want to make amends now by letting them go to sleep again!”

“But my dear fellow,” said Bert, with forced calmness, “you’re the fellow that’s making all the noise—­and—­”

“Why, you howling dervish!” interrupted John, with a feigned air of pleased surprise and admiration.  “But let’s drop controversy.  Throw the fragments of your guitar in the wood-box there, and proceed with the opening proposition.”

“What I was going to say was this,” said Bert, with a half-desperate enunciation; “I’m getting tired of this way of living—­clean, dead-tired, and fagged out, and sick of the whole artificial business!”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed John, with a towering disdain, “you needn’t go any further!  I know just what malady is throttling you.  It’s reform—­reform!  You’re going to ‘turn over a new leaf,’ and all that, and sign the pledge, and quit cigars, and go to work, and pay your debts, and gravitate back into Sunday-School, where you can make love to the preacher’s daughter under the guise of religion, and desecrate the sanctity of the innermost pale of the church by confessions at Class of your ‘thorough conversion!’ Oh, you’re going to—­”

“No, but I’m going to do nothing of the sort,” interrupted Bert, resentfully.  “What I mean—­if you’ll let me finish—­is, I’m getting too old to be eternally undignifying myself with this ’singing of midnight strains under Bonnybell’s window panes,’ and too old to be keeping myself in constant humiliation and expense by the borrowing and stringing up of old guitars, together with the breakage of the same, and the general wear-and-tear on a constitution that is slowly being sapped to its foundations by exposure in the night-air and the dew.”  “And while you receive no further compensation in return,” said John, “than, perhaps, the coy turning up of a lamp at an upper casement where the jasmine climbs; or an exasperating patter of invisible palms; or a huge dank wedge of fruit-cake shoved at you by the old man, through a crack in the door.”

“Yes, and I’m going to have my just reward, is what I mean,” said Bert, “and exchange the lover’s life for the benedict’s.  Going to hunt out a good, sensible girl and marry her.”  And as the young man concluded this desperate avowal he jerked the bow of his cravat into a hard knot, kicked his hat under the bed, and threw himself on the sofa like an old suit.

John stared at him with absolute compassion.  “Poor devil,” he said, half musingly, “I know just how he feels—­

  ’Ring in the wind his wedding chimes,
    Smile, villagers, at every door;
  Old church-yards stuffed with buried crimes,
    Be clad in sunshine o’er and o’er.—­’”