A chill of silence fell between the talkers, the one looking up and the other looking down.  The man’s next question was put in a more guarded tone: 

“Does your mother pose as a model?”

“No, Mister, she doesn’t pose as a model.  She’s posing as herself.  She said I must have a teacher.  Mister, were you ever poor?”

The man looked the boy over from head to foot.

“Do you think you are poor?” he asked.

The good-natured reply came back in a droll tone: 

“Well, Mister, we certainly aren’t rich.”

“Let us see,” objected the man, as though this were a point which had better not be yielded, and he began with a voice of one reckoning up items:  “Two feet, each cheap at, say, five millions.  Two hands—­five millions apiece for hands.  At least ten millions for each eye.  About the same for the ears.  Certainly twenty millions for your teeth.  Forty millions for your stomach.  On the whole, at a rough estimate you must easily be worth over one hundred millions.  There are quite a number of old gentlemen in New York, and a good many young ones, who would gladly pay that amount for your investments, for your securities.”

The lad with eager upturned countenance did not conceal his amusement while the man drew this picture of him as a living ragged gold-mine, as actually put together and made up of pieces of fabulous treasure.  A child’s notion of wealth is the power to pay for what it has not.  The wealth that childhood is, escapes childhood; it does not escape the old.  What most concerned the lad as to these priceless feet and hands and eyes and ears was the hard-knocked-in fact that many a time he ached throughout this reputed treasury of his being for a five-cent piece, and these reputed millionaires, acting together and doing their level best, could not produce one.

Nevertheless, this fresh and never-before-imagined image of his self-riches amused him.  It somehow put him over into the class of enormously opulent things; and finding himself a little lonely on that new landscape, he cast about for some object of comparison.  Thus his mind was led to the richest of all near-by objects.

“If I were worth a hundred million,” he said, with a satisfied twinkle in his eyes, “I would be as rich as the cathedral.”

A significant silence followed.  The man broke it with a grave surprised inquiry: 

“How did you happen to think of the cathedral?”

“I didn’t happen to think of it; I couldn’t help thinking of it.”

“Have you ever been in the cathedral?” inquired the man more gravely still.

“Been in it!  We go there all the time.  It’s our church.  Why, good Lord!  Mister, we are descended from a bishop!”

The man laughed outright long and heartily.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said as one who suddenly feels himself to have become a very small object through being in the neighborhood of such hereditary beatitudes and ecclesiastical sanctities.  “Are you, indeed?  I am glad to know.  Indeed, I am!”