A Camp Sunday 69 



entendre was discomfiture transformed into the triumph of a 

 well turned phrase. 



"It wasn't so bad, Bill" comforted the artist. "You might 

 have done worse. You might have mislaid yourself, as an ac- 

 quaintance of mine did once." And here he proceeded to a 

 recital of the phenomenal absent-mindedness of one Squiggs, one 

 of those quaintly learned, semi-professional specialists on ob- 

 scure things, who occasionally appear at high fees in the law 

 courts. A precise, methodical man, as befitted his occupation, 

 he was accustomed to leave his office for lunch, at the same time 

 every day to a dot. Having no office boy or stenographer, he 

 was used to hang upon his office door a neatly written card 

 announcing his return at one-thirty. As regularly as he went, 

 he returned, to the second. One day, some unobserved con- 

 catenation of circumstances brought him back to his office a full 

 ten minutes before his appointed time. At his office door his 

 eye fell upon the notice. Subconsciously aware that it was 

 not yet the appointed time for his own return, he took out his 

 watch, and noted the time. Equally aware that the man whose 

 name was on the card would return at the announced time, he 

 methodically paced to the head of the nearby stair, and sat down 

 to wait for himself. 



Here is added another paragraph to the long roll of trouty 

 capriciousness. This evening the pink-bellied jokers would not 

 even look at the flies tied with care and pains, though the 

 whitefish took them eagerly enough, little to the liking of 

 the fishers, who consequently returned empty handed, never- 

 theless content with the beauty of the afternoon and evening 

 in the open. 



At evening, in the east, against a middle sky of luminous 

 pearly green, was a lower sky of iridescent rose clouds on which 

 were drifts of pale violet. Upon this and rising over its upper 

 border into the clear green above, were two or three long extending 

 level-bottomed cumulus clouds, flaming with pale rose and rose 

 pearl. In the west, the Madison range rose dark against a small 

 area of brilliant pale lemon. About this, and extending upward 

 and outward from it hung dark masses of down-dropping storm 

 clouds, whose lower fringes flamed in burning crimson against the 

 threatening gray, over a leaden lake, down whose center the 



