"May be it is me that smells frowy," said the boy as he put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and spit at the keyhole in the door. "I have gone into business."
"By thunder, I believe it is you," said the grocery man, as he went up to the boy and snuffed a couple of times and then held his hand to his nose. "The board of health will kerosene you if they ever smell that smell, and send you to the glue factory. What business have you gone into to make you smell so rank?"
"Well, you see Pa began to think it was time I learned a trade, or a profession, and he saw a sign in a drug store window 'boy wanted,' and as he had a boy he didn't want, he went to the druggist and got a job for me. This smell on me will go off in a few weeks. You know I wanted to try all the perfumery in the store, and after I had got about forty different extracts on my clothes, another boy that worked there he fixed up a bottle of benzine and assafety and brimstone, and a whole lot of other horrid stuff, and labeled it 'rose geranium,' and I guess I just wallered in it. It _is_ awful, aint it? It kerflummixed Ma when I went into the dining-room the first night that I got home from the store, and broke Pa all up. He said I reminded him of the time they had a litter of skunks under the barn. The air seemed fixed around where I am, and everybody seems to know who fixed it. A girl came into the store yesterday to buy a satchet, and there wasn't anybody there but me, and I didn't know what it was, and I took down everything in the store pretty near before I found it, and then I wouldn't have found it only the proprietor came in. The girl asked the proprietor if there wasn't a good deal of sewer gas in the store, and he told me to go out and shake myself. I think the girl was mad at me because I got a nursing bottle out of the show case with a rubber muzzle, and asked her if that was what she wanted. Well, she told me a sachet was something for the stummick, and I thought a nursing bottle was the nearest thing to it."
[Illustration: NEW WAY OF TAKING SEIDLITZ POWDERS]
"I should think you would drive all the customers away from the store," said the groceryman as he opened the door to let the fresh air in.