“Oh, this’ll do,” she said, calmly.  “I just thought I’d call and put it up to you.  I guess you people are all right.  But a girl has feelings, you know.  I’ve heard one of you was a Southerner—­I wonder which one of you it is?”

She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door.  There, with a flash of white teeth and a dip of the heavy plume, she disappeared.

Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time.  But now they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rug toward them from his seat in the corner.

“Young marster,” he said, “take yo’ watch.”

And without hesitation he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of its rightful owner.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue.  Once a customer, you are always his.  I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again.

Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty.  You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street.  When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of the sweatshops.

One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone.  He began to anoint my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and dirt like a magnet.

“They say the Indians weave ’em under water,” said I, for a leader.

“Don’t you believe it,” said Finch.  “No Indian or white man could stay under water that long.  Say, do you pay much attention to politics?  I see in the paper something about a law they’ve passed called ’the law of supply and demand.’”

I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.

“I didn’t know,” said Finch.  “I heard a good deal about it a year or so ago, but in a one-sided way.”

“Yes,” said I, “political orators use it a great deal.  In fact, they never give it a rest.  I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side.”

“I heard it from a king,” said Finch—­“the white king of a tribe of Indians in South America.”

I was interested but not surprised.  The big city is like a mother’s knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their uncertain feet.  At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-step.  I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in Africa, a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster’s claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in sight.  So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress me.