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A whole year went by wherein Mehronay was sober, and did not look upon the wine when it was red or brown or yellow or any other colour. Now when he "writ a piece" there was frequently something in it defending women's rights. Also he severed diplomatic relations with the girl clerks in the White Front and the Bee Hive and the Racket, and bought a cane and aspired to some dignity of person.
We always knew when to expect what he called a "piece" from Mehronay which meant an article into which he put more than ordinary endeavour for his bee-song would grow louder, with now and then an intelligible word in it, and if it was to be an exceptional piece Mehronay would whistle.
It was a curious thing for Mehronay to write; indeed, few people in town realised that he did write it; for he had been rollicking over town on his beat every day for months after the revival, and half the pious people in town thought he shammed his emotion the night he came to the church merely to mock them and their revivalist.
In the fall we learned through the girls in the Bee Hive that he had bought a white shirt and a pair of celluloid cuffs. This rumour set the office afire with curiosity, but no one dared to tease Mehronay. For no one knew who she was. Not until late in the fall, when Madame Janauschek came to the opera house to play "Macbeth," did Mehronay uncover his intrigue.
Before sending him out on the street in the morning, someone in the office had to button him up, and if it was a gala day say circus day, or the day of a big political pow-wow we had to put a clean paper collar on Mehronay above his brown wool shirt and shove out the dents in his derby hat a procedure which he called "making a butterfly of fashion out of an honest workin' man."
It was Mehronay who put the advertisement in the paper proclaiming the fact that General Durham of the Statesman office desired to purchase a good second-hand fiddle, and explaining that the owner must play five tunes on it in front of the Statesman office door before bringing it in.
They went to New York City, where she peddled his pieces about town until she got him a regular place. There they have lived happily ever after. Mehronay brings his envelope home every Saturday night, and she gives him his carfare and his shaving-money and puts the rest where it will do the most good.
And then, as he put the copy on the hook and got his hat, he would tell us in most profane language what it was all about quoting the best sentences and chuckling to himself as he went out onto the street. As the spring filled out and became summer we noticed that Mehronay was singing fewer gospel hymns and rather more sentimental songs than usual.
He was everyone's friend, and spoke cheerily to the dogs and the horses, and was no more courteous to the preachers and the bankers, who are our most worshipful ones in town, than to the men from Red Martin's gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met upon the street. He always called her sister.
It was Mehronay who took a galley of pi which the office devil had set up from a wrecked form, and interspersed up and down the column of meaningless letters "Great applause" "Tremendous cheering" Cries of "Good, good! that's the way to hit 'em!" "Hurrah for Hancock" and ran it in the paper as a report of Carl Schurz's speech to the German-American League at the court-house.
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