“Is Captain Carroll the president of them?” asked the small man, with an impressed air.  He was very young, and eager-looking, and very shabby.  He grubbed on a tiny ancestral farm, for a living for himself and wife and four children, young as he was.  He had never had enough to eat, at least of proper food.  He did not come to the “Tonsorial Parlor” to be shaved, for he hacked away at his innocent cheeks at home with his deceased father’s old razor, but he loved a little gossip.  In fact, John Flynn’s barber-shop was his one dissipation.  Sometimes he looked longingly at a beer-saloon, but he had no money, unless he starved Minna and the children, and for that he was too good and too timid.  His Minna was a stout German girl, twice his size, and she ruled him with a rod of iron.  She did not approve of the barber-shop, and so the pleasure had something of the zest of a forbidden one.

Every Sunday he was at his wit’s end, which was easily reached, to invent a suitable excuse for his absence.  To-day it had been to see if Mrs. Amidon did not want to buy some apples.  Some of their last winter’s store had been miraculously preserved, and Minna saw the way to a few pennies thereby.  He could quite openly say that he had been to the barber-shop to-day, having seen Amidon there, therefore he was quite easy in his mind, and leaned back in his chair with perfect content.  One of the children at home cried all the time.  A yawning mouth of wrath at existence was about all he ever saw of that particular baby, and Minna almost always scolded, and this was a haven of peace to little Willy Eddy.

Here he felt like a man among men; at home he felt like nothing at all among women.  The children were all girls.  Sometimes he wondered if a boy-baby might not have been a refuge.  He was not very clean; his hands were still stained with picking over potatoes the day before; his shoulders in their rusty coat had a distinct hunch; but he was radiantly happy talking of the rich Captain Carroll.  He seemed to taste the honey of the other man’s riches and importance in his own mouth.  Willy Eddy did not know the meaning of envy.  He had such a fund of sympathetic imagination that he possessed the fair possessions of others like a child with fairy tales.

“Is he president of all of them?” asked little Willy Eddy, with gusto, and looked as if he himself held them all in his meagre potato-stained hands.

“No,” replied the barber, with importance—­“no, he’s more than a president.  A president is nothin’ except a figger-head.  I don’t care what he’s president of, whether it is of this great country or of railroads or what not.  They could git along without the president, but they can’t without this gentleman.  He’s the promoter.”

“Oh!” said the small man.

The milkman sighed wrathfully again.  “Oh, hang it all!” he said.  “I’ve seed promoters.  It’s mostly their own pockets they promote.”