There you have the mystery solved, and no checks to write
for the hypodermical wizard or fi'-pun notes to toss to the sergeant.
Then let's get down to the heart of the thing, tiresome readers--the
Christmas heart of the thing.
Fuzzy was drunk--not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as you or
I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively, as becomes
a gentleman down on his luck.
Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the
park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary
beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly
garnered largesse of great cities--these formed the chapters of his
history.
Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one side of
the Millionaire's house and grounds. He saw a leg of Betsy, the lost
rag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian murder mystery,
from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence. He dragged forth the
maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm, and went on his way crooning
a road song of his brethren that no doll that has been brought up to the
sheltered life should hear. Well for Betsy that she had no ears. And
well that she had no eyes save unseeing circles of black; for the faces
of Fuzzy and the Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and the heart of
no rag-doll could withstand twice to become the prey of such fearsome
monsters.
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