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By Root 8875 0

serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry, and that anything else led only to mad-ness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning. It wasn't so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help were al old people; about his own age there was only Skinny Murray the other bel hop, a tal sandyhaired boy who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a smal airless room right up under the roof that would stil be so hot from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it. Through the thin partition they could hear the waitresses in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smel of girls and cheap facepowder that drifted in through the cracks in the wal . The hottest nights he and Skinny would take the screen out of the window and crawl out along the gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them, but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once the girls were looking out of the window and saw them

-78-crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that they were peeping and that they'd report them to the manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans al night about what they'd do if they were fired, they'd go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next day the girls didn't say anything about it. Dick was kinda disappointed because he hated waiting on people and run-ning up and down stairs answering bel s. It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some extra money sel ing fudge, because when Dick got a

package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick con-vinced him it wouldn't be fair for him to take more than ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put up the original capital. The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudge-sel ing. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing with rich boys al winter whose parents had plenty of money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the summer. He told Skinny al about the school and recited bal ads about St. John Hospital er and Saint Christopher he'd made up and that had been published in the school paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he'd made the outfield in the junior basebal team. Dick made Skinny go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal chapel cal ed St. Mary's-by-theSea. Dick used to stay after the service and discuss points of doctrine and cere-mony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was final y invited to come home with him to dinner and meet his wife.

The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bun--79-galow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs. Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful. She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Ed-win's attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whis-per meekly, "Hilda, you oughtn't to talk like that"; then he'd turn mildly to Dick and say, "Her bark is worse than her bite, you know." They got to be great friends and Dick took to running around to their house whenever he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sel some fudge.

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