He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest pockets for a nickel and peering around the booth at the friendly ticket-taker.  But the latter was thinking about buying Johnny’s pants.  Should he get them at the Fourteenth Street Store, or Siegel-Cooper’s, or over at Aronson’s, near home?  So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn’s pasteboard slip was indifferently received in the plate-glass gullet of the grinder without the taker’s even seeing the clerk’s bow and smile.

Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion.  He wanted to turn back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by shyness.  He had liked the man’s “Fine evenin’, sir “—­rain or shine—­but he wouldn’t stand for being cut.  Wasn’t he making nineteen dollars a week, as against the ticket-taker’s ten or twelve?  He shook his head with the defiance of a cornered mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded the moving pictures gloomily.

They helped him.  After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring Vitagraph Western scene, “The Goat of the Rancho,” which depicted with much humor and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, a Chinaman.  Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager’s surliness and revolting against the ticket-man’s rudeness.  Now he was ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures.  He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.

He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been planning a great journey.  Though he had done Staten Island and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand tour.  It was yet to be taken.  In Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic roaming.  He knew it.  He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in “markets with tiles on the roofs and temples and—­and—­uh, well—­places!” The scent of Oriental spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for “home”—­for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street.  He wanted to prowl through his collection of steamship brochures for a description of Java.  But, of course, when one’s landlady has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops in the basement dining-room to inquire how she is.

Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady.  When she sat down there was a straight line from her chin to her knees.  She was usually sitting down.  When she moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked.  She groaned and creaked from bed to breakfast, and ate five griddle-cakes, two helpin’s of scrapple, an egg, some rump steak, and three cups of coffee, slowly and resentfully.  She creaked and groaned from breakfast to her rocking-chair, and sat about wondering why Providence had inflicted upon her a weak digestion.  Mr. Wrenn also wondered why, sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be much cheered by the sympathy of a nigger-lovin’ Yankee, who couldn’t appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp’s Bog, allied to all the First Families of Virginia.