One Sunday afternoon he came to see us, thinking by mistake that Uncle William and Uncle Henry were there, but they weren’t, and his manner seemed so strange and constrained that I was certain that there was something that he was trying to say and it made me dreadfully nervous and confused.  And at last quite suddenly he said that there was something that he wanted to ask me if I wouldn’t think it a liberty.  My breath stopped and I couldn’t speak, and then he went on to ask if he might lend us twenty-five dollars.  He got very red in the face when he said it and he began counting out the money on the sofa, and somehow I hadn’t expected that it was money and began to cry.  But I told Mr. Peters that of course we couldn’t think of taking any money, and I begged him to pick it up again and then I began to try to tell him about how hard it was to get along and to ask him to get work for Uncle William, but I started to cry again.  Mr. Peters came over to my chair and took hold of the arm of it and told me not to cry.  Somehow his touch on the arm of the chair thrilled all through me and though I knew that it was wrong I let him keep it there and even let him stroke the upholstery and I don’t know just what would have happened but at that very minute Uncle William came in.  He was most courteous to Mr. Peters and expressed his apologies for having been out and said that it must have been extremely depressing for Mr. Peters to find that he was not at home, and he thanked him for putting himself to the inconvenience of waiting.  And a little while after that Mr. Peters left.

The Next Day

Mr. Peters came back this morning and said that he had got work for Uncle William.  So I was delighted.  He said that Uncle will make a first class “street man,” and that he has arranged for a line of goods for him and that he has a “territory” that Uncle can occupy.  He showed me a flat cardboard box filled with lead pencils and shoe-strings and little badges and buttons with inscriptions on them, and he says these are what is called a “line,” and that Uncle can take out this line and do splendidly.  I don’t quite understand yet who makes the appointment to be a street man or what influence it takes or what it means to have a territory, but Mr. Peters explained that there is a man who is retiring from being a street man and that Uncle can take his place and can have both sides of the Bowery, which sounds very pretty indeed.

At first I didn’t understand—­because Mr. Peters hesitated a good deal in telling me about it—­that if Uncle gets this appointment, it will mean that he will sell things in the street.  But as soon as I understood this I felt that Uncle William would scorn to do anything like this, as the degradation would be the same as being President of the Steel Corporation.  So I was much surprised to find that when Uncle came in he didn’t look at it that way at all.  He looked at the box of