“Well, I don’t know,” said the postmaster, as one with authority.  “I don’t know.  Captain Carroll was in the office the other day, and we had a little talk, and it struck me that some of the ventures he is interested in were quite promising.  And it is different with a man of his wealth.  When a poor man takes up anything of the kind, you can suspect, but this is different.  He said to me that he had no occasion, so far as the money was concerned, to turn his finger over for any of them or to open his mouth concerning them.  He said he would not be afraid to stake every dollar he had in the world on them if it was necessary.”

Flynn had daintily anointed Rosenstein’s shaven face with witch-hazel and was now dusting it with powder.  Tappan was slouching towards the chair.

“Have you bought some of the stock?” the barber asked, abruptly, of the postmaster, who smiled mysteriously and hedged.

“Well, maybe I have, and maybe again I haven’t,” said he.  “Have you, John?”

“Not yet,” replied the barber.  “I am deflecting upon the matter.  It requires considerable loggitation when a man has penuriously saved a circumscribed sum from the sweat of his brow.”

“That’s so.  Don’t be rash, John,” said Amidon.

It was not especially funny, but since Amidon intended it to be, they all obligingly laughed, except Tappan, who set himself with a grunt in the chair and had the white sheet of which Rosenstein had been denuded tied around his neck.

Rosenstein, who was a lean man, with a much-lined face, cast a glance at himself in the looking-glass, and heaved an odd sigh as he turned away to get his hat.

“You don’t seem to be much stuck on your looks, old man,” remarked Amidon.

Rosenstein cast a perfectly good-humored but rather melancholy look at Amidon.  “No; I never was,” he replied, soberly.  “Can’t remember when I wouldn’t have preferred to meet some other fellow in the looking-glass.  It’s such an awful thing, the intimacy with himself that’s forced on a man when he comes into this world.”

“That’s so,” assented Amidon, rather stupidly, but he was not to be abashed with the other man’s metaphysics.  Rosenstein did credit to his German ancestry at times, and was then in deep waters for his village acquaintances.

“Who would you ruther meet in the lookin’-glass than yerself?” pursued Amidon.

“Not you,” replied Rosenstein, with unexpected repartee, and was going out amid a chorus of glee at Amidon’s discomfiture when another man darkened the doorway, and the storekeeper fell back as Captain Carroll entered amid a sullen silence.