 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. The Trimmed Lamp, BioHenry. Chapter 1, The Trimmed Lamp. Of course, there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear shop girls spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as marriage girls. Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work, because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen. Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active country girls, who had no ambition to go on the stage. The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became wage earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Metalsome reader. My lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. While you are shaking hands, please take notice cautiously of their attire. Yes, cautiously, for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse-show is. Lou is a piece-worker ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badly fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long. But her ermine muff and scarf cost twenty-five dollars, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the window at seven dollars and ninety-eight cents before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her. Nancy you would call a shop-girl, because you have the habit. There is no type, but a perverse generation is always seeking a type. So this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour and the exaggerated straight front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flair. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntly as though it were Persian lamb. On her face and in her eyes remorseless type-seeker is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood, of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come. When she laughs her loudest, the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants, and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel's face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look that should wither in a bash man, but he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers, with a string tied to them. Now lift your hat and come away while you receive Lou's cheery, see you again, and the sardonic sweet smile of Nancy that seems somehow to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops to the stars. The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou's steady company. Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena-servers to find her lamb. Ain't you cold, Nancy? said Lou? Say what a chump you are for working in that old store for eight dollars a week. I made eighteen fifty last week. Of course ironing isn't as swell work as selling lace behind a counter, but it pays. None of us ironers make less than ten, and I don't know that it's any less respectful work either. You can have it, said Nancy, with uplifted nose. I'll take my eight a week and haul bedroom. I like to be among nice things and swell people. And look what a chance I've got. Why, one of our glove girls married a Pittsburgh steel-maker, or blacksmith or something, the other day worth a million dollars. I'll catch a swell myself sometime. I ain't bragging on my looks or anything, but I'll take my chances where there's big prizes offered. What show would a girl have in a laundry? That's where I met my dad, said Lou triumphantly. He came in for his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board ironing. We all tried to get to work at the first board. Ella McGinnis was sick that day, and I had her place. He said he noticed my arms first, how round and white they was. I had my sleeves rolled up. Some nice fellows come into laundries. You can tell them by their bringing their clothes and suitcases, and turning in the door sharp and sudden. How can you wear a waist like that, Lou? said Nancy, gazing down at the offending article with sweet scorn in her heavy-litted eyes. It shows fierce taste. This waist cried Lou with wide-eyed indignation why I paid sixteen dollars for this waist. It's worth twenty-five. A woman left it to be laundered and never called for it. The boss sold it to me. I've got yards and yards of hand embroidery on it. Better talk about that ugly plain thing you've got on. This ugly plain thing, said Nancy calmly, was copied from one that Mrs. Van Alston Fisher was wearing. The girls say her bill in the store last year was twelve thousand dollars. I made mine myself. It cost me a dollar fifty. Ten feet away you couldn't tell it from hers. Oh well, said Lou good-naturedly. If you want to starve and put on airs, go ahead. But I'll take my job in good wages, and after hours give me something as fancy and attractive to wear as I am able to buy. Just then Dan came, a serious young man with a ready-made neck-tie, who had escaped the city's brand of friviality, an electrician earning thirty dollars per week, who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to be caught. My friend Mr. Owens, shake hands with Miss Danforth, said Lou. I might be glad to know you, Miss Danforth, said Dan, without stretched hand. I've heard Lou speak of you so often. Thanks, said Nancy, touching his fingers with the tips of her cool ones. I've heard her mention you a few times. Lou giggled. Did you get that handshake from Mrs. Van Alston Fisher, Nance? She asked. If I did, you can feel safe in copying it, said Nancy. Oh, I couldn't use it at all. It's too stylish for me. It's intended to set off diamond rings that high shake is. Wait till I get a few, and then I'll try it. Learn it first, said Nancy wisely, and you'll be more likely to get the rings. Now to settle this argument, said Dan, with his ready, cheerful smile. Let me make a proposition. As I can't take both of you up to Tiffany's and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville? I've got the rickets. How about looking at stage diamonds, since we can't shake hands with the real sparklers? A faithful squire took his place close to the curb. Lou knaxed a little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes. Nancy on the inside slender and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van Alliston Fisher walk, thus they set out for their evening's moderate diversion. I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it or another's. The people she served were mostly women, whose dress manners and position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy began to take toll, the best from each according to her view. From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing inferiors in station. From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alliston Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice, as clear as silver, and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so perhaps good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience, but if you sit on a straight back chair and repeat the words, prisms and pilgrims, forty times, the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alliston Fisher tones, she felt the thrill of no bless oblige to her very bones. There was another source of learning in the great departmental school. Here you see three or four shop girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation. Do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberate bodies of man, but it has all the importance of the occasion on which even her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is woman's conference for common defense, an exchange of strategical theories of attack and repulse, upon and against the world, which is a stage, and man its audience who persists in throwing bouquets thereupon, woman the most helpless of the young of any animal, with the fawn's grace but without its fleetness, with the bird's beauty but without its power of flight, with the honeybee's burden of sweetness, but without its, oh, let's drop that simile. Some of us may have been stung. During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the tactics of life. I says to him, says Sadie, ain't you the fresh thing? Who do you suppose I am to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you think he says back to me? The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red and yellow, bobbed together. The answer is given, and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages at arms with the common enemy, man. Thus Nancy learned the art of defense, and to women successful defense means victory. The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college would have fitted her as well for her life's ambition, the drawing of a matrimonial prize. Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near enough for her to hear, and become familiar with the works of the best composers, at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of artwares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost culture to women. The other girls soon became aware of Nancy's ambition. Here comes your millionaire, Nancy. They would call to her whenever any man who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and doddle over the cambrick squares. Nancy's imitation, high-bred air, and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires. Others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter, and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners. Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs and wooed her across the counter with a king co-fetua air. When he had gone, one of the girls said, What's wrong, Nancy, that you didn't warm up to that fellow? He looks the swell article all right to me. Him? said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal Van Alliston Fisher smile. Not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A twelve-horsepower machine and an irish chauffeur. And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought. Silk! And he's got dactylists on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please. Two of the most refined women in the store, a four-lady and a cashier, had a few swell gentlemen friends, with whom they now and then dined, once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular café whose tables were engaged for New Year's Eve a year in advance. There were two gentlemen friends, one without any hair on his head, high living ungrew it, and we can prove it. The other, a young man who's worth in sophistication, he impressed upon you in two convincing ways. He swore that all the wine was corked, and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy, his taste ran to shop girls, and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker charms of her own case. So on the following day he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hemstitched, grass- bleached irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbratings in horror upon Nancy's head. What a terrible little fool you are, that fellow's a millionaire. He's a nephew of old Van Skittles himself, and he was talking on the level, too. Have you gone crazy, Nancy? Have I, said Nancy? I didn't take him, did I? He isn't a millionaire so hard that you could notice it anyhow. His family only allows him twenty thousand a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guing him about it the other night at supper. The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes. Say, what do you want, she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of chewing-gum. Ain't that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon, and marry Rockefeller, and Gladstone Dowie, and the King of Spain, and the whole bunch? Ain't twenty thousand a year good enough for you? Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of her black shallow eyes. It wasn't altogether the money, Carrie, she explained. His friend caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some girl he said he hadn't been to the theatre with. Well, I can't stand a liar. Put everything together. I don't like him, and that settles it. When I sell out, it's not going to be on any bargain day. I've got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man anyhow. Yes, I'm looking out for a catch, but it's got to be able to do something more than make a noise like a toy bank. The physiopathic word for yours, said the brown pompadour walking away. These high ideas, if not ideals, Nancy continued to cultivate on eight dollars per week. She bivouacked on the trail of the great unknown catch, eating her dry bread and tightening her belt day by day. On her face was the faint, soldierly, sweet, grim smile of the preordained man-hunter. The store was her forest, and many times she raised her rifle at game that seemed broad, antlered, and big, but always some deep, unerring instinct, perhaps of the huntress, perhaps of the woman, made her hold her fire and take up the trail again. Lou flourished in the laundry. Out of her eighteen fifty per week she paid six dollars for her room and board. The rest went mainly for clothes. Her opportunities for bettering her taste in manners were few compared with Nancy's. In the steaming laundry there was nothing but work, work, and her thoughts of the evening pleasures to come. Many costly and showy fabrics passed under her iron, and it may be that her growing fondness for dress was thus transmitted to her through the conducting metal. Whenever the day's work was over, Dana waited her outside, her faithful shadow in whatever light she stood. Sometimes he cast an honest and troubled glance at Lou's clothes that increased the conspicuity rather than in style, but this was no disloyalty. He deprecated the attention they called to her in the streets. And Lou was no less faithful to her chum. There was a law that Nancy should go with them on whatsoever outings they might take. Dan bore the extra burden heartily and in good cheer. It might be said that Lou furnished the color, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the distraction-seeking trio. The escort in his neat but obviously ready-made suit, his ready-made tie, an unfailing, genial, ready-made wit, never startled or clashed. He was of that good kind that you are likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after they are gone. To Nancy's superior taste the flavor of these ready-made pleasures was sometimes a little bitter. But she was young, and youth is a gourmand, when it cannot be a gourmet. Dan is always wanting me to marry him right away, Lou told her once. But why should I? I'm independent. I can do as I please with the money I earn, and he never would agree for me to keep on working afterward. And say, Nancy, what do you want to stick up to that old store for, and half starve and half dress yourself? You could get a place in the laundry right now if you'd come. It seems to me that you could afford to be a little less stuck up if you could make a good deal more money. I don't think I'm stuck up, Lou, said Nancy, but I'd rather live on half-rations and stay where I am. I suppose I've got the habit. It's the chance that I want. I don't expect it to be always behind a counter. I'm learning something new every day. I'm right up against refined and rich people all the time. Even if I do only wait on them, and I'm not missing any pointers that I see passing around. Caught your millionaire yet? Asked Lou with her teasing laugh. I haven't selected one yet, answered Nancy. I've been looking them over. Goodness! The idea of picking over them? Don't you ever let one get by you, Nancy, even if he's a few dollars shy? But of course you're joking. Millionaires don't think about working girls like us. It might be better for them if they did, said Nancy with cool wisdom. Some of us could teach them how to take care of their money. If one was to speak to me, Laugh, Lou, I know I'd have a duck fit. That's because you don't know any. The only difference between swells and other people is you have to watch them closer. Don't you think that red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou? Lou looked at the plain dull olive jacket of her friend. Well, no I don't. But it may seem so beside that faded looking thing you've got on. This jacket, said Nancy complacently, has exactly the cut and fit of one that Mrs. Van Alliston Fisher was wearing the other day. The material cost me three dollars and ninety-eight cents. I suppose hers cost about a hundred dollars more. Oh, well, said Lou lightly, it don't strike me as millionaire-bait. Shouldn't wonder if I catch one before you do, anyway. Truly it would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride and fastidiousness, that keeps stores and desks filled with girls working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort, so that her dress profited until some time she cast a side-long glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of Dan, Dan the constant, the immutable, the undeviating. As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands, silk and jewels and laces and ornaments, and the perfume and music of the fine worlds of good breeding and taste. These were made for women. They are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Isau was, for she keeps her birthright and the potted she earns is often very scant. In this atmosphere Nancy belonged, and she throwed in it and ate her frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and contented mind. She already knew woman, and she was studying man, the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. One day she would bring down the game that she wanted, but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller. Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come. But another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollar mark grew blurred in her mind's eye and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as truth and honour, and now and then just kindness. Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and empowered, where a real trickles babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt. So Nancy wondered sometimes if Persian lamb was always quoted at its market value by the hearts that it covered. One Thursday evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth Avenue westward to the laundry. She was expected to go with Lou and Dan to a musical comedy. Dan was just coming out of the laundry when she arrived. There was a queer, strained look on his face. I thought I would drop around to see if they had heard from her, he said. Heard from who, asked Nancy, isn't Lou there? I thought you knew, said Dan, she hasn't been here or at the house where she lived since Monday. She moved all her things from there. She told one of the girls in the laundry she might be going to Europe. Hasn't anybody seen her anywhere, asked Nancy. Dan looked at her with his jaws set grimly and a steely gleam in his steady gray eyes. They told me in the laundry, he said harshly, that they saw her pass yesterday, in an automobile, with one of the millionaires, I suppose, that you and Lou were forever busying your brains about. For the first time Nancy quailed before a man. She laid her hand that trembled slightly on Dan's sleeve. You've no right to say such a thing to me, Dan, as if I had anything to do with it. I didn't mean it that way, said Dan softening. He fumbled in his vest pocket. I've got the tickets for the show tonight, he said, with a gallant show of lightness, if you—Nancy admired Pluck whenever she saw it. I'll go with you, Dan, she said. Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again. At twilight one evening the shop girl was hurrying home along the border of a little quiet park. She heard her name called and wheeled about in time to catch Lou rushing into her arms. After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do, ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on their swift tongues. And then Nancy noticed that prosperity had descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems in the creations of the tailor's art. You little fool cried Lou loudly and affectionately. I see you are still working in that store, and as shabby as ever. How about that big catch you are going to make? Nothing doing yet, I suppose. And then Lou looked, and saw that something better than prosperity had descended upon Nancy, something that shone brighter than gems in her eyes and redder than a rose in her cheeks, and that dance like electricity anxious to be loosed from the tip of her tongue. Yes, I'm still in the store, said Nancy, but I'm going to leave it next week. I've made my catch the biggest catch in the world. You won't mind now, Lou, will you? I'm going to be married to Dan, to Dan. He's my Dan now, why Lou? Around the corner of the park strolled one of these new crop, smooth-faced young policemen, that are making the force more indurable, at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat and diamond-ringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of the park, sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plain-dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was wise enough to know that these matters are beyond help, so far as the power he represents is concerned, though he wrapped the pavement with his night-stick till the sound goes up to the furthermost stars. End of The Trimmed Lamp. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. The Trimmed Lamp, Bio Henry. Chapter 2, A Madison Square Arabian Night. To Carson Chalmers, in his apartment near the square, Phillips brought the evening mail. Beside the routine correspondence, there were two items bearing the same foreign postmark. One of the incoming parcels contained a photograph of a woman. The other contained an interminable letter over which Chalmers hung absorbed for a long time. The letter was from another woman, and it contained poison barbs, sweetly dipped in honey, and feathered with innuendos concerning the photographed woman. Chalmers tore this letter into a thousand bits and began to wear out his expensive rug by striding back and forth upon it, thus an animal from the jungle acts when it is caged, and thus a caged man acts when he is housed in a jungle of doubt. By and by the restless mood was overcame. The rug was not an enchanted one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it, three thousand miles was beyond its power to aid. Phillips appeared. He never entered. He invariably appeared, like a well-oiled genie. "'Will you dine here, sir, or out?' he asked. "'Here,' said Chalmers, and in half an hour. He listened glumly to the January blasts, making an aeolian trombone of the empty street. "'Wait,' he said to the disappearing genie. As I came home across the end of the square, I saw many men standing there in rows. There was one mounted upon something talking. Why do those men stand in rows? And why are they there?' "'They are homeless men, sir,' said Phillips. The man standing on the box tries to get lodging for them for the night. People come around to listen and give him money. Then he sends as many as the money will pay for, to some lodging-house. That is why they stand in rows. They get sent to bed in order as they came. "'By the time dinner is served,' said Chalmers, have one of those men here. He will dine with me. Which!' began Phillips, stammering for the first time during his service. "'Choose one at random,' said Chalmers. You might see that he is reasonably sober, and a certain amount of cleanliness will not be held against him. That is all.' It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the caliph. But on that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional anecdotes to melancholy. Something wanton and agregious, something high-flavored and Arabian he must have to lighten his mood. On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the lamp. The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the delectable dinner. The dining-table, laid for two, glowed cheerily in the glow of the pink-shaded candles. And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal or held in charge a burglar, wafted in the shivering guest who'd been hailed from the line of mendicant lodgers. It is a common thing to call such men wrecks. If the comparison be used here, it is the specific one of a derelict coming to grief through fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk his face and hands had been recently washed. A rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes, with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless, tricky defiance, like that scene in a curse that is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter-inch of redeeming collar showed above it. His manner was singularly free from embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his chair across the round dining-table. "'If you will oblige me,' said the host, I will be glad to have your company at dinner.' "'My name is Plumer,' said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive tones. "'If you're like me, you like to know the name of the party you're dining with.' "'I was going on to say,' continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, "'that mine is Chalmers. Will you sit opposite?' Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide the chair beneath him. He had an air of having sat at attended boards before. Phillips set out the anchovies and olives. "'Good,' barked Plumer. "'Going to be in courses, is it? All right. My jovial ruler of Baghdad. I'm your Sheher Hurseda, all the way to the toothpicks. You're the first caliph with a genuine oriental flavor I've stuck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I finish counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me to the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed tonight as I have of being the next president. How will you have the sad story of my life, Mr. Al Rashid, a chapter with each course, or the whole addition with the cigars and coffee? The situation does not seem a novel one to you,' said Chalmers with a smile. "'By the chin whiskers of the Prophet, no,' answered the guest. Now New York's is full of cheap haru and al-Rashids, as Baghdad is of fleas. I've been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my head twenty times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something for nothing. They spell curiosity and charity with the same set of building blocks. Lots of them will stake you to a dime and chop Suey, and a few of them will play caliph to the tune of a top surloin. But every one of them will stand over you till they screw your autobiography out of you with footnotes, appendix, and unpublished fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Baghdad on the subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper. I claim dissent from the late Tommy Tucker, who was forced to hand out vocal harmony for his predigested weed arena and spoop-chew. I do not ask your story,' said Chalmers. I tell you frankly that it was a sudden whim that prompted me to send for some stranger to dine with me. I assure you you will not suffer through any curiosity of mine. Oh, fudge, exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his soup. I don't mind it a bit. I'm a regular oriental magazine, with a red cover and the leaves cut when the caliph walks abroad. In fact, we fellows in the bedline have a sort of union rate for things of this sort. Somebody's always stopping and wanting to know what brought us down so low in the world. For a sandwich and a glass of beer I tell him that drink did it. For corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I give him the hard-hearted landlord six months in the hospital lost job story. A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street tragedy of the swept away fortune and the gradual descent. This is the first spread of this kind I've stumbled against. I haven't got a story to fit it. I tell you what, Mr. Chalmers, I'm going to tell you the truth for this, if you'll listen to it. It'll be harder for you to believe than the made-up ones. An hour later the Arabian guest lay back with a sigh of satisfaction while Phillips brought the coffee and cigars and cleared the table. Did you ever hear of Sherard Plumer, he asked with a strange smile? I remember the name, said Chalmers. He was a painter, I think, of a good deal of prominence a few years ago. Five years, said the guest. Then I went down like a chunk of lead. I'm Sherard Plumer. I sold the last portrait I painted for two thousand dollars. After that I couldn't have found a sitter for a gratis picture. What was the trouble, Chalmers could not resist asking? Funny thing, answered Plumer grimly. Never quite understood it myself. For a while I swam like a cork. I broke into the swell crowd and got commissions right and left. The newspapers called me a fashionable painter. Then the funny things began to happen. Whenever I finished a picture people would come to see it and whisper and look queerly at one another. I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don't know how I did it. I painted what I saw, but I know it did me. Some of my sitters were fearfully enraged and refused their pictures. I painted the portrait of a very beautiful and popular society dame. When it was finished her husband looked at it with a peculiar expression on his face and the next week he sued for divorce. I remember one case of a prominent banker who sat to me. While I had his portrait on exhibition in my studio an acquaintance of his came in to look at it. Bless me, says he, does he really look like that? I told him it was considered a faithful likeness. I never noticed that expression about his eyes before, said he. I think I'll drop downtown and change my bank account. He did drop down, but the bank account was gone and so was Mr. Banker. It wasn't long till they put me out of business. People don't want their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile and twist their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can't. I couldn't get an order for another picture and I had to give up. I worked as a newspaper artist for a while, then as a lithographer, but my work with them got me into the same trouble. If I drew from a photograph my drawing showed up characteristics and expressions that you couldn't find in the photo. But I guess they were in the original all right. The customers raised lively rouse, especially the women, and I never could hold a job long. So I began to rest my weary head upon the breast of old booze for comfort, and pretty soon I was in the free bed line and doing oral fiction for handouts among the food bazaars. Does the truthful statement weary thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street disaster stop if you prefer. But that requires a tear, and I'm afraid I can't hustle one up after that good dinner. No, no, Sid Chalmers, earnestly. You interest me very much. Did all of your portraits reveal some unpleasant trait? Or were there some that did not suffer from the ordeal of your peculiar brush? Some? Yes, said Plumer, children generally, a good many women, and a sufficient number of men. All people aren't bad, you know. When they were all right, the pictures were all right. As I said, I don't explain it, but I'm telling you facts. On Chalmers' writing-table lay the photograph that he had received that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at work, making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the artist rose and stretched wearily. It's done, he yawned. You'll excuse me for being so long. I got interested in the job. Lordy, but I'm tired. No bed last night, you know. Guess it'll have to be a night now, O commander of the faithful. Chalmers went as far as the door with him, and slipped some bills into his hand. Oh, I'll take him, said Plumer. All that's included in the fall. Thanks. And for the very good dinner I shall sleep on feathers to-night and dream of Baghdad. I hope it won't turn out to be a dream in the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph. Again Chalmers paced restlessly upon his rug, but his beat lay as far from the table, whereon lay the pastel sketch as the room would permit. Twice, thrice, he tried to approach it but failed. He could see the dun in gold and brown of the colors, but there was a wall about it built by his fears that kept him at a distance. He sat down and tried to calm himself. He sprang up and rang for Philips. There is a young artist in this building, he said, a Mr. Reinemann. Do you know which is his apartment? Top floor front, sir, said Philips. Go up and ask him to favour me with his presence here for a few minutes. Reinemann came at once. Chalmers introduced himself. Mr. Reinemann said he. There is a little pastel sketch on yonder table. I would be glad if you will give me your opinion of it as to its artistic merits and as a picture. The young artist advanced to the table and took up the sketch. Chalmers half turned away, leaning upon the back of a chair. How do you find it, he asked slowly. As a drawing said the artist, I can't praise it enough. It's the work of a master, bold and fine and true. It puzzles me a little. I haven't seen any pastel work near as good in years. The face man, the subject, the original, what would you say of that? The face, said Reinemann, is the face of one of God's own angels. May I ask who— My wife shouted Chalmers, wheeling and pouncing upon the astonished artist, gripping his hand and pounding his back. She is travelling in Europe. Take that sketch, boy, and paint the picture of your life from it, and leave the price to me. End of A Madison Square Arabian Night This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Coming by Marian Brown, Toronto, Canada The Trimmed Lamp by O'Henry Chapter 3 The Ruby Yacht of a Scotch Highball This document is intended to strike somewhere between a temperance lecture and the bartender's guide. Relative to the latter, drink shall swell the theme and be set forth in abundance. Relative to the former, not an elbow shall be crooked. Bob Babbitt was off the stuff, which means, as you will discover by referring to the unabridged dictionary of Bohemia, that he had cut out the booze, that he was on the water wagon. The reason for Bob's sudden attitude of hostility toward the demon rum, as the white ribboner's Miss Call Whiskey, see the bartender's guide, should be of interest to reformers and saloon keepers. There is always hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or acknowledge that he was ever drunk, but when a man will say, in the apt words of the phrase Distiller, I had a beautiful skate on last night. You will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as pray for him. One evening on his way home, Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway Bar that he liked best. Always there were three or four fellows there from the downtown offices, whom he knew. And then there would be high balls and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor standard oil company. On this evening, as he entered, he heard some one say, Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl. Babbitt walked to the bar and saw in the mirror that his face was as white as chalk. For the first time he had looked truth in the eyes. Others had lied to him. He had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration, had been modlin' intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel, his gay humours nothing but the noisy vagaries of a sought, but never again. A glass of seltzer, he said to the bartender. A little silence fell upon the group of his cronies, who had been expecting him to join them. Going off the stuff, Bob? One of them asked politely, and with more formality than the high balls ever called forth. Yes, said Babbitt. Some one of the group took up the unwashed thread of a story he'd been telling. The bartender shoved over a dime and a nickel change from the quarter, ungarnished with his customary smile, and Babbitt walked out. Now, Babbitt had a home and a wife, but that is another story, and I will tell you that story, which will show you a better habit and a worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase. It began away in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much trouble begins. Or begin? How would you say that? It was July, and Jesse was a summer border at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who was just out of college, saw her one day, and they were married in September. That's the tabloid novel, one swallow of water, and it's gone. But those July days let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on Romeo and Juliet, and Abraham Lincoln's thrilling sonnet about, you can fool some of the people, etc., and Darwin's works. But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar's ruby yacht. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart. Not consecutively, but picking them out here and there, as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent stake, à la bordelais. Calvin County is full of rocks and trees, and Jesse used to sit on them, and please be good, used to sit on the rocks, and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders, holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favourite verses of the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then. Indeed they agreed that the wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe love or life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes with a sixty-cent tabla dot. Where was I? Oh, they married and came to New York. Bob showed his college diploma and accepted a position filling ink stands in a lawyer's office at fifteen dollars a week. At the end of two years he had worked up to fifty dollars, and gotten his first taste of Bohemia, the kind that won't stand the borax and formaldehyde tests. They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia was sugar and spice. She hung fish-scenes on the wall of her rooms, and bought a rakeish-looking sideboard and learned to play the banjo. Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian tabla dot in a cloud of smoke and bragg and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti and leave her olive-stones for the waiter to pick up. Jess she essayed to say la la la in a crowd, but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard was stocked with scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new friends in to dinner, and all were laughing at nothing by one a.m. Some plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay four dollars and fifty cents. Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that had no boundary lines or government. And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every afternoon before he went home. Drink always rubbed him the right way, and he would reach his rooms as jolly as a sand-boy. Jessy would meet him at the door, and generally they would dance some insane kind of rigadoon about the floor by way of greeting. Once, when Bob's feet became confused, and he tumbled headlong over a footstool, Jessy laughed so heartily and long that he had to throw all the couch pillows at her to make her hush. In such wise life was speeding for them on the day when Bob Babbitt first felt the power that the gifty gied him. But let us get back to our lamb and mint sauce. When Bob got home that evening he found Jessy in a long apron cutting up a lobster for the new-berg. Usually when Bob came in mellow from his hour at the bar his welcome was hilarious, though somewhat tinctured with scotch smoke. By screams and snatches of song and certain audible testimonials of domestic felicity was his advent proclaimed. When she heard his foot on the stairs the old maid in the hall room always stuffed cotton into her ears. At first Jessy had shrunk from the rudeness and favour of these spiritual greetings. But as the fog of the false bohemia gradually encompassed her she came to accept them as love's true and proper greeting. Bob came in without a word, smiled, kissed her neatly but noiselessly, took up a paper and sat down. In the hall room the old maid held her two plugs of cotton poised, filled with anxiety. Jessy dropped lobster a knife and ran to him with frightened eyes. What's the matter, Bob? Are you ill? Not at all, dear. Then what's the matter with you? Nothing. Harken, brethren! When she who has a right to ask interrogates you concerning a change she finds in your mood answer her thus. Tell her that you, in a sudden rage, have murdered your grandmother. Tell her that you have robbed orphans and that remorse has stricken you. Tell her your fortune is swept away, that you are beset by enemies, by bunions, by any kind of malevolent fate. But do not, if peace and happiness are worth as much as a grain of mustard seed to you, do not answer her nothing. Jessy went back to the lobster in silence. She cast looks of darkest suspicion at Bob. He'd never acted that way before. When dinner was on the table she set out the bottle of scotch and the glasses. Bob declined. Tell you the truth, Jessy, said, I've cut out the drink. Help yourself, of course. If you don't mind, I'll try some of the seltzer straight. You've stopped drinking? She said, looking at him steadily and unsmilingly. What for? It wasn't doing me any good, said Bob. Don't you approve of the idea? Jessy raised her eyebrows and one shoulder slightly. Entirely she said with a sculpted smile. I could not conscientiously advise anyone to drink her smoke or whistle on Sunday. The meal was finished almost in silence. Bob tried to make talk, but his efforts lacked the stimulus of previous evenings. He felt miserable, and once or twice his eye wandered toward the bottle, but each time the scathing words of his Bible-less friend sounded in his ear and his mouth set with determination. Jessy felt the change deeply. The essence of their lives seemed to have departed suddenly. The restless fever, the false gaiety, the unnatural excitement of the shoddy Bohemia in which they lived, had dropped away in the space of the popping of a cork. She stole curious and forlorn glances at the dejected Bob, who wore the guilty look of at least a wife-beater or a family tyrant. After dinner the coloured maid who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessy, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and set them on the table. May I ask, she said, with some of the ice in her tones, whether I am to be included in your sudden spasm of goodness? If not, I'll make one for myself. It's rather chilly this evening, for some reason. Oh, come now, Jess, said Bob good-naturedly. Don't be too rough on me. Help yourself by all means. There's no danger of your overdoing it. But I thought there was with me, and that's why I quit. Give yours, then let's get out the banjo and try over that new quick-step. I've heard, said Jessy in the tones of the oracle, that drinking alone is a pernicious habit. No, I don't think I feel like playing this evening. If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil habit of banjo playing too. She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other side of the table. Neither of them spoke for half an hour. Then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look on his face, and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders, taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers. In a moment to Jessy the walls of the sane hung room vanished, and she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills. Bob felt her hands quiver in his as he began the verse from old Omar. Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring, the winter garment of repentance fling, the bird of time has but a little way to fly and low, the bird is on the wing. Then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of scotch into a glass. But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in, and blown away the mist of the false Bohemia. Jessy leaped with one fierce sweep of her hand, sent the bottle and glasses crashing to the floor. The same motion of her arm carried it around Bob's neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight. Oh, my God, Bobby, not that verse. I see it now. I wasn't always such a fool, was I? The other one, boy. The one that says, remold it to the heart's desire. Say that one. To the heart's desire. I know that one, said Bob. It goes, Ah, love, could you and I with him conspire to grasp the sorry scheme of things entire? Would not we? Let me finish it, said Jessy. Would not we shatter it to bits, and then remold it nearer to the heart's desire? It shattered all right, said Bob, crunching some glass under his heel. In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady, located the smash. It's that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home sourced again, she said. And he's got such a nice little wife, too. End of THE RUBYOT OF THE SCOTCH HIGH BALL. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. The Trim Lamp, Bio Henry. CHAPTER IV THE PENGELUM 81st Street, let him out, please, yelled the Shepard in blue. A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out, and another flock scrambled aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle-cars of the Manhattan elevated rattled away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock. John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as perhaps. There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat. As he walked, John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusion of the monotonous day. Katie would meet him at the door with a kiss flavoured with cold cream and butterscotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read in the evening paper of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly lino-type. For dinner there would be a pot roast, a salad flavoured with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb, and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katie would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the icemen had cut for her off the end of his foreign hand. At half-past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat men in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey and Mooney of the vaudeville team unbooked in the flat across the hall would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the illusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five hundred dollar a week contract. When the gent at the window across the air-shaft would get out his flute a nightly gas-leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways. The dumb-waiter would slip off its trolley. The janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowski's five children once more across the yalu. The lady with the champagne shoes and the sky-terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box with the evening routines of the Frogmore Flats would be under way. John Perkins knew these things would happen, and he knew that at a quarter-past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a quireless tone. Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, John Perkins? Thought I'd drop up to McCloskey's, he would answer, play a game or two of pool with the fellows. Of late such had been John Perkins's habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katie would be asleep, sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore Flats. Tonight John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the common place when he reached his door. No Katie was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentious disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder-box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs. This was not Katie's way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these comings in the little blue vahs on the mantle to be some day formed into the coveted feminine rat. Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper. John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus. Dear John, I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick. I'm going to take the 4.30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice-box. I hope it isn't her Quincy again. Pay the milkman fifty cents. She had it bad last spring. Don't forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow. Hastily, Katie. Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katie been separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a dumb-founded way. Here was a break in a routine that never varied, and it left him dazed. There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals. Her weekday clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butterscotch lay with its string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad timetable had been clipped from it. Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead remains with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart. He began to set the room tidy as well as he could, when he touched her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had never thought what existence would be without Katie. She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed, necessary but scarcely noticed. Now without warning she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home. John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee and sat down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade's shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polished dressing. His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lairs and penat sky high. After a solitary meal John sat at a front window. He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until dawn if he liked, and there would be no wrathful Katie waiting for him, bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool at McCloskey's with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the electric bulbs if he chose. The hymnial strings that had curbed him always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katie was gone. John Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions. But as he sat in Katie bereft ten by twelve parlor, he hit unerringly upon the keynote of his discomfort. He knew now that Katie was necessary to his happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dined into us by proverb and sermon and fable, that we never prized the music till the sweet-voiced bird has flown, or in no less florid and true utterances? I'm a double-dyed dub, mused John Perkins, the way I've been treating Katie, off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with nothing to amuse her and me acting that way. John Perkins, you're the worst kind of a shine. I'm going to make it up for the little girl. I'll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I'll cut out the McCloskey gang right from this minute. Yes, there was the city roaring outside for John Perkins to come dance in the train of Momas. And at McCloskey's the boys were knocking the balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game. But no Primrose way nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of Perkins the bereft. The thing that was his, lightly held and half scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it. Backward to a certain man named Adam, whom the cherubim bounced from the orchard, could Perkins the remorseful trace his descent. Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it stood Katie's blue shirt waist. It still retained something of her contour. Midway of the sleeves were fine individual wrinkles made by the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A delicate but impelling odor of blue bells came from it. John took it and looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine. Katie had never been unresponsive. Tears, yes. Tears came into John Perkins's eyes. When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all his neglect. What was life without her? The door opened. Katie walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John stared at her stupidly. My I'm glad to get back, said Katie. Ma wasn't sick to amount to anything. Sam was at the depot and said she just had a little spell and got all right soon after they telegraphed it, so I took the next train back. I'm just dying for a cup of coffee. Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog wheels as the third floor front of the Frogmore Flats buzzed its machinery back into the order of things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted, and the wheels revolved in their old orbit. John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat and walked to the door. Now where are you going, I'd like to know, John Perkins? Asked Katie in a queeralist tone. Thought I'd drop up to McCloskey, said John, and play a game or two of pool with the fellows. End of The Pendulum. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. The Trimmed Lamp, Bio Henry. Story number five. Two Thanksgiving Day gentlemen. There is one day that is ours. There's one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat salad-tourist biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don't just remember who they were. But we can lick them, anyhow, if they try to land again. Plymouth Rocks? Well, that sounds more familiar. Lots of us have had to come down to Hen since the Turkey Trust got its work in. But somebody in Washington is leaking out advance information to him about these Thanksgiving Day proclamations. The big city east of the Cranberry Bogs has made Thanksgiving Day an institution. The last Thursday in November is the only day in the year on which it recognizes the part of America lying across the fairies. It is the one day that is purely American, yes, a day of celebration exclusively American. And now for the story, which is to prove to you that we have traditions on this side of the ocean that are becoming older at a much rapider rate than those of England are, thanks to our get-up and enterprise. Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he has taken his seat there promptly at one o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him. Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart equally on the other side. But today Stuffy Pete's appearance at the annual tristing place seem to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such extended intervals. Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly embedded in a swollen and gravy smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes. A senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Questions that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn, screwing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a split shirt front open to the wish-bone. But the November breeze carrying fine snowflakes brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric reproduced by a super bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including, it seemed to him, all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt. The meal had been an unexpected one. He was passing a red brick mansion near the beginning of Fifth Avenue in which live two old ladies of ancient family and a reverence for traditions. They even denied the existence of New York and believed that Thanksgiving Day was declared solely for Washington Square. One of their traditional habits was to station a servant at the poster and gates, with orders to admit the first hungry wayfarer that came along after the hour of noon had struck and banquet him to a finish. Stuffy Pete happened to pass by on his way to the park, and the Seneshals gathered him in and upheld the custom of the castle. After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes, he was conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left, and then his eyes bulged out fearfully and his breath ceased, and the roughshod ends of his short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel, for the old gentleman was coming across Fourth Avenue toward his bench. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the old gentleman had come there and found Stuffy Pete on his bench. That was a thing that the old gentleman was trying to make a tradition of. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had found Stuffy there, and had led him to a restaurant and watched him eat a big dinner. They do those things in England unconsciously. But this is a young country, and nine years is not so bad. The old gentleman was a staunch American patriot, and considered himself a pioneer in American tradition. In order to become picturesque, we must keep on doing one thing for a long time without ever letting it get away from us, something like collecting the weekly dimes in industrial insurance or cleaning the streets. The old gentleman moved straight and stately toward the institution that he was rearing. Truly the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Carta or Jam for Breakfast was in England, but it was a step. It was almost futile. It showed, at least, that a custom was not impossible to New Y—ahem, America. The old gentleman was tall and thin and sixty. He was dressed all in black, and wore the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won't stay on your nose. His hair was wider and thinner than it had been last year, and he seemed to make more use of his big knobbly cane with the crooked handle. As his established benefactor came up, Stuffy wheezed and shuddered like some woman's overfat pug when a street dog bristles up at him. He would have flown, but all the skill of Santos Dumont could not have separated him from his bench. Well had the mere middens of the two old ladies done their work. Good morning, said the old gentleman, I am glad to perceive that the vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move in health about the beautiful world, for that blessing alone this day of thanksgiving is well proclaimed to each of us. If you will come with me, my man, I will provide you with a dinner that should make your physical being accord with the mental. This is what the old gentleman said every time, every thanksgiving for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an institution. Nothing could be compared with them except the declaration of independence, always before they had been music in Stuffy's ears. But now he looked up at the old gentleman's face with tearful agony in his own, the fine snow almost sizzled when it fell upon his perspiring brow, but the old gentleman shivered a little and turned his back to the wind. Stuff he had always wondered why the old gentleman spoke his speech rather sadly. He did not know that it was because he was wishing every time that he had a son to succeed him, a son who would come there after he was gone, a son who would stand proud and strong before some subsequent stuffy and say in memory of my father, then it would be an institution. But the old gentleman had no relatives. He lived in rented rooms in one of the decayed old family brownstone mansions in one of the quiet streets east of the park. In winter he raised fuchsias in a little conservatory the size of a steamer-trunk. In the spring he walked in the Easter parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in New Jersey Hills and sat in a wicker arm-chair speaking of a butterfly, the Ornithoptera amtheresis that he hoped to find some day. In the autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These were the old gentleman's occupations. Stuffy Pete looked up at him for half a minute, stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The old gentleman's eyes were bright with the giving pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little black necktie was in as joddy a bow as ever, and the linen was beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled carefully at the ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a pot. Speech was intended, and as the old gentleman had heard the sound nine times before he rightly construed them into Stuffy's old formula of acceptance. Thank ye, sir, I'll go with ye, and much obliged, I'm very hungry, sir. The coma of repletion had not prevented from entering Stuffy's mind the conviction that he was the basis of an institution. His thanksgiving appetite was not his own. It belonged by all the sacred rites of established custom, if not by the actual statute of limitations, to this kind old gentleman who had preempted it. True, America is free, but in order to establish tradition, someone must be a repettent, a repeating decimal. The heroes are not all heroes of steel and gold. See one here that wielded only weapons of iron, badly silvered and tin. The old gentleman led his annual protégé southward to the restaurant and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were recognized. Here comes the old guy, said a waiter, that blows that same bomb to a meal every thanksgiving. The old gentleman sat across the table, glowing like a smoked pearl at his cornerstone of future ancient tradition. The waiters heaped the table with holiday food, and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger's expression, raised knife and fork, and carved for himself a crown of imperishable bay. No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks of an enemy. Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as fast as they could be served. Gorge nearly to the uttermost when he entered the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his honor as a gentleman, but he rallied like a true knight. He saw the look of beneficent happiness on the old gentleman's face, a happier look than even the fuchsias and the ornithoptera Amphrissarius had ever brought to it, and he had not the heart to see it wane. In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won. Thank ye kindly, sir. He puffed like a leaky steampipe. Thank ye kindly for a hearty meal. Then he arose heavily with glazed eyes and started toward the kitchen. A waiter turned him about like a top and pointed him toward the door. The old gentleman carefully counted out a dollar thirty in silver change, leaving three nickels for the waiter. They parted as they did each year at the door, the old gentleman going south, Stuffy north. Around the first corner Stuffy turned and stood for one minute. Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers, and fell to the sidewalk like a sun-stricken horse. When the ambulance came the young surgeons and driver cursed softly at his weight. There was no smell of whiskey to justify a transfer to the patrol wagon, so Stuffy and his two dinners went to the hospital. There they stretched him on a bed and began to test him for strange diseases, with the hope of getting a chance at some problem with the bare steel. Then low an hour later another ambulance brought the old gentleman, and they laid him on another bed and spoke of appendicitis, for he looked good for the bill. But pretty soon one of the young doctors met one of the young nurses, whose eyes he liked, and stopped to chat with her about the cases. That nice old gentleman over there now he said, you wouldn't think that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He told me he hadn't eaten a thing for three days. End of two Thanksgiving Day gentlemen. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information and to find out how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marion Brown, Toronto, Canada. The Trimmed Lamp, Bio Henry. The Assessor of Success. Hastings Beauchamp Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying look at the hundreds that lulled upon the park benches. They were a motley lot, he thought, the men with stolid animal unshaven faces, the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their feet that hung four inches above the graveled walks. For I, Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller, I would put a few millions in my inside pocket and make an appointment with all the park commissioners around the corner if necessary, and arrange for benches in all the parks of the world low enough for women to sit upon and rest their feet upon the ground. After that I might furnish libraries to towns that would pay for them or build sanitariums for crank professors and column colleges if I wanted to. As rights societies have been laboring for many years after equality with man, with what result, when they sit on a bench they must twist their ankles together and uncomfortably swing their highest French heels clear of earthly support. Begin at the bottom, ladies, get your feet on the ground, then rise to theories of mental equality. Hastings Beauchamp Morley was carefully and neatly dressed. That was the result of an instinct due to his birth and breeding. It has denied us to look further into a man's bosom than the starch on his shirt front, so it is left to us only to recount his walks and conversation. Morley had not a scent in his pockets, but he smiled pittingly at a hundred grimy unfortunate ones who had no more, and would have had no more when the sun's first rays yellowed the tall paper-cutter building on the west side of the square, but Morley would have enough by then. Sundown had seen his pockets empty before, but sunrise had always seen them lined. First he went to the house of a clergyman off Madison Avenue and presented a forged letter of introduction that wholly purported to issue from a pastorate in Indiana. This netted him five dollars when backed up by a realistic romance of a delayed remittance. On the sidewalk twenty steps from the clergyman's door a pale-faced fat man huskily enveloped him with a raised red fist and the voice of a bell-boy demanding payment of an old score. Why Bergman, man, sang Morley dulcetly, is this you? I was just on my way up to your place to settle up. That remittance from my aunt arrived only this morning. Wrong address was the trouble. Come up to the corner and I'll square up. Time to see you saves me a walk. Four drinks placated the emotional Bergman. There was an air about Morley when he was backed by money in hand that would have stayed off a call-loan at Rothschild's. When he was penniless his bluff was pitched half a tone lower, but few are competent to detect the difference in the notes. You gum to my place and bay me to morrow, Mr. Morley, said Bergman. Excuse me that I'd done you on the street, but I have not seen you in three months, Prost. Morley walked away with a crooked smile on his pale, smooth face. The credulous drinks often German amused him. He would have to avoid 29th Street in the future. He had not been aware that Bergman ever went home by that route. At the door of a darkened house, two squares to the north, Morley knocked with a peculiar sequence of wraps. The door opened to the length of a six-inch chain and the pompous important black face of an African guardian imposed itself in the opening. Morley was admitted. In a third-story room, in an atmosphere opaque with smoke, he hung for ten minutes above a roulette-wheel. Then downstairs he crept, and was outsped by the important negro jingling in his pocket the forty cents in silver that remained to him of his five-dollar capital. At the corner he lingered, undecided. Across the street was a drugstore, well-lighted, sending forth gleams from the German silver and crystal of its soda fountain and glasses. Along came a youngster of five, headed for the dispensary, stepping high with the consequence of a big errand, possibly one to which his advancing age had earned him promotion. In his hand he clutched something tightly, publicly, proudly, conspicuously. He stopped him with his winning smile and soft speech. "'Me,' said the youngster, I'm going to the drugstore for mama. She gave me a dollar to buy a bottle of medicine. "'Now, now, now,' said Morley, such a big man you are to be doing errands for mama. I must go along with you, my little man, to see that the cars don't run over him, and on the way we'll have some chocolates. Or would he rather have lemon drops?' Morley entered the drugstore, leading the child by the hand. He presented the prescription that had been wrapped around the money. On his face was a smile, predatory, parental, politic, profound. "'Aqua pura, one pint,' said he to the drugist. "'Sodium chloride, ten grains, fiat solution, and don't try to skin me, because I know all about the number of gallons of H-T-O in the Croton reservoir, and I always use the other ingredient on my potatoes.' "'Fifteen cents,' said the drugist, with a wink after he'd compounded the order. "'I see you understand pharmacy. A dollar is the regular price. To gulls,' said Morley, smilingly. He settled the wrap bottle carefully in the child's arms and escorted him to the corner. In his own pocket he dropped the eighty-five cents accruing to him by virtue of his chemical knowledge. "'Look out for the car's sunny,' he said cheerfully to his small victim. Two street-guards suddenly swooped in opposite directions upon the youngster. Morley dashed between them and pinned the infantile messenger by the neck, holding him in safety. Then from the corner of his street he sent him on his way, swindled, happy, and sticky with vile, cheap candy, from the Italian's fruit stand. Morley went to a restaurant in order to sirloin and a pint of inexpensive chateau broielle. He laughed noiselessly, but so genuinely that the waiter ventured to premise that good news had come his way. "'Why, no,' said Morley, who seldom held conversation with anyone. It is not that. It is something else that amuses me. Do you know what three divisions of people are easiest to overreach in transactions of all kinds?' "'Sure,' said the waiter, calculating the size of the tip promised by the careful nod of Morley's tie. There's the buyers from the dry-good stores to the south during August, and honey-mooners from Staten Island, and— "'Wrong,' said Morley, chuckling happily. The answer is just men, women, and children. The world, while, say, New York, and as far as summer borders can swim out from Long Island, is full of greenhorns. Two minutes longer on the broiler it would have made this steak fit to be eaten by a gentleman, Francois. "'If yes, thinks it's on de bomme,' said the waiter, while Morley lifted his hand in protest, slightly martyred protest. "'It will do,' he said magnanimously, and now, greenchartrus, frappe, and demi-tasse.' Morley went out leisurely and stood on a corner where two tradeful arteries of the city cross. With a solitary diamondous pocket he stood on the curb, watching with confident, cynical, smiling eyes the tides of people that flowed past him. Into that stream he must cast his net and draw fish for his further sustenance and need. Good Isaac Walton had not the half of his self-reliance and bait-lore. A joyful party of four, two women and two men, fell upon him with cries of delight. There was a dinner-party on. Where had he been for a fortnight past? What luck to thus run upon him! They surrounded and engulfed him. He must join them, tra-la-la, and the rest. One with a white-hat plume curving to the shoulder touched his sleeve, and cast at the others a triumphant look that said, "'See what I can do with him?' and added her queen's command to the invitations. "'I leave you to imagine,' said Morley, pathetically, how it desolates me to forego the pleasure, but my friend Carrethors of the New York Yacht Club is to pick me up here in his motor-car at eight.' The white plume tossed, and the quartet danced like midges around an arc-light down the frolic some way. Morley stood, turning over and over the diamond in his pocket and laughing gleefully to himself. Front, he chanted under his breath. Front does it. It is trumps in the game. How they all take it in. Men, women, and children, forgeries, water, and salt lies. How they all take it in. An old man with an ill-fitting suit. A straggling gray beard and a corpulent umbrella hopped from the conglomeration of cabs and street-cars to the sidewalk at Morley's side. "'Stranger,' said he, "'excuse me for troubling you. But do you know anybody in this here town, named Solomon's Mothers?' "'He's my son, and I've come down from Ellenville to visit him. Be darned if I know what I've done with his street number.' "'I do not,' said Morley, half-closing his eyes to veil the joy in them. "'You'd better apply to the police.' "'The police?' said the old man. "'I ain't done nothing to call in the police about. I just come down to see Ben. He lives in a five-story house. He writes me. If you know anybody by that name, and could—' "'I told you I did not,' said Morley coldly. "'I know no one by the name of Smithers, and advise you to—' "'Smothers, not Smithers,' interrupted the man, hopefully. A heavy-sought man, sandy-complected, about twenty-nine, two-front teeth out, about five-foot. "'Oh, Smothers,' exclaimed Morley, saw Smothers, while he lives in the next house to me. I thought you said Smithers.' Morley looked at his watch. "'You must have a watch. You can do it for a dollar. Better go hungry than forgo a gun-metal, or the ninety-eight-cent one that the railroads, according to these watchmakers, are run by.' "'The Bishop of Long Island,' said Morley, was to meet me here at eight, to dine with me at the Kingfisher's Club. But I can't leave the father of my friend Saul Smothers alone on the road. "'By St. Swithin, Mr. Smothers, we Wall Street men have to work. Tired is no name for it. I was about to step across to the other corner, and have a glass of ginger ale with a dash of sherry when you approached me. You must let me take you to Saul's house, Mr. Smothers. But before we take the car, I hope you will join me in,'' An hour later Morley seated himself on the end of a quiet bench in Madison Square, with a twenty-five-cent cigar between his lips and a hundred and forty dollars in deeply creased bills in his inside pocket. Content, light-hearted, ironical, keenly philosophic, he watched the moon drifting in and out amidst a maze of flying clouds. An old, ragged man with a low-bode head sat on the other end of the bench. Presently the old man stirred and looked at his bench companion. In Morley's appearance he seemed to recognize something superior to the usual nightly occupants of the benches. Kind, sir, he wind, if you could spare a dime or even a few pennies to one who— Morley cut short his stereotype to peel by throwing him a dollar. God bless you, said the old man. I've been trying to find work for— Work, echoed Morley with a ringing laugh. You are a fool, my friend. The world is a rock to you, no doubt. But you must be an errand and smite it with your rod. Then things better than water will gush out of it for you. That is what the world is for. It gives to me whatever I want from it. God has blessed you, said the old man. It is only work that I have known, and now I can get no more. I must go home, said Morley, rising and buttoning his coat. I stopped here only for a smoke. I hope you may find work. May your kindness be rewarded this night, said the old man. Oh, said Morley, you have your wish already. I am satisfied. I think good luck follows me like a dog. I am for yonder bright hotel across the square for the night. And what a moon that is lighting up the city to-night. I think no one enjoys the moonlight and such little things as I do. Well, a good night to you. Morley walked to the corner where he would cross to his hotel. He blew slow streams of smoke from his cigar heavenward. A policeman passing saluted to his benign nod. What a fine moon it was. The clock struck nine as a girl just entering womanhood, stopped on this corner waiting for the approaching car. She was hurrying as if homeward from employment or delay. Her eyes were clear and pure. She was dressed in simple white. She looked eagerly for the car and neither to the right nor the left. Morley knew her. Eight years before he had sat on the same bench with her at school, there had been no sentiment between them. Nothing but the friendship of innocent days. But he turned down the side street to a quiet spot and laid his suddenly burning face against the cool iron of a lamppost and said, Dully, God, I wish I could die. End of Assessor of Success. The Trimmed Lamp by O. Henry The Buyer from Cactus City It is well that hay fever and colds do not obtain in the healthful vicinity of Cactus City, Texas, for the dry goods emporium of Navarro and Platts situated there is not to be sneezed at. Twenty thousand people in Cactus City scatter their silver coin with liberal hands for the things that their hearts desire. The bulk of this semi-precious metal goes to Navarro and Platts. Their huge brick building covers enough ground to graze a dozen head of sheep. You can buy of them a rattlesnake skin neck-tie, an automobile, or an eighty-five dollar latest style ladies' tan coat in twenty different shades. Navarro and Platts first introduced pennies west of the Colorado River. They had been ranchmen with business heads who saw that the world did not necessarily have to cease its revolutions after free grass went out. Every spring Navarro, senior partner, fifty-five, half Spanish, cosmopolitan, able, polished, had gone on to New York to buy goods. This year he shied at taking up the long trail. He was undoubtedly growing older, and he looked at his watch several times a day before the hour came for his siesta. John, he said to his junior partner, you shall go on this year to buy the goods. Platts looked tired. I'm told, said he, that New York is a plum-dead town, but I'll go. I can take a whirl at Saint-Antoine for a few days on my way and have some fun. Two weeks later a man in a Texas full-dress suit, black frock coat, broad-brimmed soft white hat, and lay-down collar, three to four inch high, with black rod-iron neck-tie, entered the wholesale cloak-and-suit establishment on Zizbaum and son, on lower Broadway. Old Zizbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant, and a mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of a carpenter's rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear and shook Platts' hand. And how is the good Mr. Navarro in Texas, he said? The trip was too long for him this year, so we welcome Mr. Platts instead. A bullseye, said Platts, and I'd give forty acres of unirrigated Pecos County land to know how you did it. I knew, Grin Zizbaum, just as I know that the rainfall in El Paso for the year was twenty-eight point five inches, or an increase of fifteen inches, and that therefore Navarro and Platts will buy a fifteen thousand dollar stock of suits this spring, instead of ten thousand, as in the dry year. But that will be tomorrow. There is first a cigar in my private office that will remove from your mouth the taste of the ones you smuggle across the Rio Grande and Lake, because they are smuggled. It was late in the afternoon, and business for the day had ended. Zizbaum left Platts with a half-smoke cigar, and came out of the private office to Sun, who was arranging his diamond scarf-pin before a mirror, ready to leave. Abbey, he said, you will have to take Mr. Platts round to-night and show him things. They are customers for ten years. Mr. Navarro and I, we played chess every moment of spare time when he came. That is good. But Mr. Platts is a young man, and this is his first visit to New York. He should amuse easily. All right, said Abbey, screwing the guard tightly on his pin, I'll take him on. After he's seen the flat iron and the head-waiter at the Hotel Astor, and heard the phonograph play under the old apple tree, it'll be half past ten, and Mr. Texas will be ready to roll up in his blanket. I've got a supper engagement at eleven-thirty, but he'll be all to Mrs. Winslow before then. The next morning at ten, Platts walked into the store ready to do business. He had a bunch of hyacinths pinned on his lapel, Zizbaum himself waited on him. Navarro and Platts were good customers, and never failed to take their discount for cash. And what do you think of our little town? asked Zizbaum with the fatuous smile of the Manhattanite. I shouldn't care to live in it, said the Texan. Your son and I knocked around quite a little last night. You've got good water, but Cactus City is better lit up. You've got a few lights on Broadway, don't you think, Mr. Platts? And a good many shadows. Said Platts, I think I like your horses best. I haven't seen a crow bait since I've been in town. Zizbaum let him upstairs to show the samples of suits. Ask Miss Asher to come, he said to a clerk. Miss Asher came, and Platts of Navarro and Platts felt for the first time the wonderful bright lights of romance and glory descend upon him. He stood still as a granite cliff above the cannon of the Colorado with his wide open eyes fixed upon her. She noticed his look and flushed a little, which was contrary to her custom. This Asher was the crack model of Zizbaum and Son. She was of the blonde type known as medium, and her measurements even went the required 38, 25, 42 standard a little better. She'd been at Zizbaum's two years and knew her business. Her eye was bright but cool, and had she chosen to match her gaze against the optic of the famed basilisk, that famous monster's gaze would have wavered and softened first. Incidentally she knew buyers. Now Mr. Platts said Zizbaum, I want you to see these princess gowns in the light shades. They will be the thing in your climate. This first, if you please, Miss Asher. Swiftly in and out of the dressing-room the prize model flew, each time wearing a new costume and looking more stunning with every change. She posed with absolute self-possession before the stricken buyer, who stood tongue-tied and motionless while Zizbaum orated oilily of the styles. On the model's face was her faint impersonal professional smile that seemed to cover something like weariness or contempt. When the display was over Platts seemed to hesitate. Zizbaum was a little anxious, thinking that his customer might be inclined to try elsewhere. But Platts was only looking over in his mind the best building-sites in Cactus City, trying to select one on which to build a house for his wife to be, who was just then in the dressing-room taking off an evening gown of lavender and tulle. Take your time, Mr. Platts, said Zizbaum, think it over tonight. You won't find anybody else meet our prices on goods like these. I'm afraid you're having a dull time in New York. A young man like you, of course, you miss the society of the ladies. Wouldn't you like a nice young lady to take out to dinner this evening? Miss Asher now is a very nice young lady. She will make it agreeable for you. Why, she doesn't know me, said Platts, wonderingly. She doesn't know anything about me. Would she go? I'm not acquainted with her. Would she go? Repeated Zizbaum with uplifted eyebrows. Sure she would. I will introduce you. Sure she would go. He called Miss Asher loudly. She came calm and slightly contemptuous in her white shirt, waist, and plain black skirt. Mr. Platts would like the pleasure of your company to dinner this evening, said Zizbaum, walking away. Sure, said Miss Asher, looking at the ceiling. I'd be much pleased. 9-11 West 20th Street. What time? Say, seven o'clock? All right, but please don't come ahead of time. I room with a schoolteacher. She doesn't allow any gentlemen to call in the room. There isn't any parlor, so you'll have to wait in the hall. I'll be ready. At half-past seven Platts and Miss Asher sat at a table in a Broadway restaurant. She was dressed in a plain, filmy black. Platts didn't know that it was all a part of her day's work. With the unobtrusive aid of a good waiter, he managed to order a respectable dinner, minus the usual Broadway preliminaries. Miss Asher flashed upon him a dazzling smile. May I have something to drink? She asked. Why, certainly, said Platte, anything you want. A dry martini, she said to the waiter. When it was brought and set before her, Platte reached over and took it away. What is this? He asked. A cocktail, of course. I thought it was some kind of tea you ordered. This is liquor. You can't drink this. What is your first name? To my intimate friends, said Miss Asher freezingly. It is Helen. Listen, Helen, said Platte, leaning over the table. For many years, every time the spring flowers blossomed out on the prairies, I got to thinking of somebody that I'd never seen or heard of. I knew it was you the minute I saw you yesterday. I'm going back home to-morrow, and you're going with me. I know it, for I saw it in your eyes when you first looked at me. You needn't kick, for you've got to fall into line. Here's a little trick I picked out for you on my way over. He flipped a two-carat diamond solitaire ring across the table. Miss Asher flipped it back to him with her fork. Don't get fresh, she said severely. I'm worth a hundred thousand dollars, said Platte. I'll build you the finest house in West Texas. You can't buy me, Mr. Buyer, said Miss Asher. If you had a hundred million, I didn't think I'd have to call you down. You didn't look like the others to me at first, but I see you're all alike. Well who, asked Platte? All you buyers, you think because we girls have to go out to dinner with you or lose our jobs that you're privileged to say what you please. Well forget it. I thought you were different from the others, but I see I was mistaken. Platte struck his fingers on the table with a gesture of sudden illuminating satisfaction. I've got it, he exclaimed almost hilariously. The Nicholson Place over on the north side. There's a big grove of live oaks and a natural lake. The old house can be pulled down and a new one set further back. Put out your pipes, said Miss Asher. I'm sorry to wake you up, but you fellows might as well get wise once and for all to where you stand. I'm supposed to go to dinner with you, and help jolly you along so you'll trade with old Zizi, but don't expect to find me in any of the suits you buy. Do you mean to tell me, said Platte, that you go out this way with customers, and they all—they all talk to you like I have? They all make plays, said Miss Asher, but I must say that you've got a beaten one respect. They generally talk diamonds, while you actually dug one up. How long have you been working, Helen? Got my name, Pat, haven't you? I've been supporting myself for eight years. I was a cash girl and a rapper, then a shop girl until I was grown. And then I got to be a suit model. Mr. Texas man, don't you think a little wine would make this dinner a little less dry? You're not going to drink wine any more, dear. It's awful to think how. I'll come to the store to-morrow and get you. I want you to pick out an automobile before we leave. That's all we need to buy here. Oh, cut that out! If you knew how sick I am of hearing such talk. After the dinner they walked down Broadway and came upon Diana's little wooded park. The trees caught Platt's eye at once, and he must turn along under the winding walk beneath them. The light shone upon two bright tears in the model's eyes. I don't like that, said Platt. What's the matter? Don't you mind, said Miss Asher. Well, it's because—well, I didn't think you were that kind when I first saw you, but you are all alike. And now will you take me home? Or will I have to call a cop? Platt took her to the door of her boarding-house. They stood for a minute in the vestibule. She looked at him with such scorn in his eyes that even his heart of oak began to waver. His arm was half way round her waist, when she struck him a stinging blow on the face with her open hand. As he stepped back a ring fell from somewhere and bounded on the tiled floor. Platt groped for it and found it. Now take your useless diamond and go, Mr. Byer, she said. This was the other one, the wedding ring, said the Texan, holding the smooth gold band on the palm of his hand. Miss Asher's eyes blazed upon him in the half-darkness. Was that what you meant? Did you—somebody open the door from the inside. Good night, said Platt. I'll see you at the store to-morrow. Miss Asher ran up to her room and shook the schoolteacher till she sat up in bed ready to scream—Fire! Where is it? She cried. What I want to know, said the model, you've studied geography, Emma, you ought to know. Where is a town called Cac, Cac, Carac, Caracas City, I think it's called. How dare you wake me up for that, said the schoolteacher. Caracas is in Venezuela, of course. What's it like? Why it's principally earthquakes and negroes and monkeys and malarial fever and volcanoes. I don't care, said Miss Asher Blythly. I'm going there to-morrow.