"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.
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