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"I'll make a will in your favour, Tom," he said at the time, with a
mocking grin, "and in it I will include this miserable carcass of
mine, so that you may at least have something to sell to the doctors.
And who knows? I may scrape together a few hundred dollars before I
die, provided I don't die too soon."
"We will give you a decent burial, Uncle Joe," said Thomas Bingle,
revolting against the specific. "Do you suppose I would sell my uncle
to a--"
"Haven't you a ray of humour in that head of yours?" demanded his
uncle. "Can't you SEE a joke?"
"Well, if you were joking," said Bingle, relieved, "all well and good,
but it didn't sound that way."
"You are a simple soul," was all that Joseph said, and then borrowed
fifty dollars from his nephew for a fresh start in the world, as he
expressed it. With this slender fortune in his purse he set out into a
world that knew him not, nor was it known to him.
He came back fifteen years afterward, poorer than when he went away,
broken in health, old to the point of decrepitude, bedraggled, unkempt
and prideless.


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