Where do you Get that Noise? by Ring Lardner

I didn't lose no time tellin' Carey about Dode's dope, and Carey didn't lose no time tryin' it out. It was the second day after Hawley joined us. It looked like rain, as usual, and we was stallin' in the clubhouse, thinkin' they'd maybe call it off before we had to dress.

"I see in some paper," says Carey, "where the heavy artillery fire over in Europe is what makes all this duck weather."

He didn't get no rise; so he wound up again.

"It seems like it must be somethin' that does it because they wasn't never no summer like this before," he says.

"What do you mean -- no summer like this? " says Hawley.

"No summer with so much rain as they's been this summer," Carey says.

"Where do you get that stuff? " says Hawley. "This here summer's been dry, you might say."

"Yes," says Carey; "and you might say the Federals done well in Newark."

"I mean," says Hawley, "that this here summer's been dry compared to other summers."

"I s'pose," says Carey, "they wasn't never such a dry summer?"

"They's been lots of 'em," Hawley says.

"They's been lots o' summers that was drier and they's been lots o' summers when they was more rain."

"Not in the last twenty years," says Carey.

"Yes, in the last twenty years too," says Hawley. "Nineteen years ago this summer made this here one look like a drought. It come up a storm the first day o' May and they wasn't a day from then till the first o' September when it didn't rain one time or another."

"You got some memory," says Carey -- "goin' back nineteen years."

"I guess I ought to remember it," says Hawley. "That was the first year my old man left me go to the ball games alone, and they wasn't no games in our town from April till Labor Day. They wasn't no games nowheres because the railroads was all washed out. We lived in Cleveland and my old man was caught in New York when the first o' the floods come and couldn't get back home for three months."

"Couldn't he hire a canoe nowheres? " says Carey.

"Him and some others was thinkin' about tryin' the trip on a raft," says Hawley, "but my old lady was scared to have him try it; so she wrote and told him to stay where he was."

"She was lucky to have a carrier pigeon to take him the letter," says Carey. "Or did you swim East with it?"

"Swim! " Hawley says. "Say, you wouldn't talk about swim if you'd saw the current in them floods!"