That which did please him—­please him immensely—­ was the outcome of a visit made some days after the party by old Nat Ganger.

“Regular Aladdin lamp,” Nat shouted, slamming Kling’s door behind him.  “One rub, bang goes the rubbish, and up comes an Oriental palace.  Another rub and little devils swarm over the walls and ceilings and begin hanging up stuffs and lamps.  Another rub, and before you can wink your eye, out steps a little princess, a million times prettier than any Cinderella that ever lived.  Wonderful!  Wonderful!

“Where is the darling child anyway.  Can’t I see her?  I got away from Sam, telling him I was going to look up another frame for one of my pictures.  Here it is.  All a lie, every bit of it.  It’s Sam’s picture.  Not mine.  I wrapped it up so he wouldn’t know, but I came to see that darling child all the same, for I’ve got a surprise for her.  But first I want you to see this picture.  Here, wait until I untie this string.  It’s one of Sam’s Hudson Rivery things.  Palisades and a steamboat in the foreground, and an afternoon sky.  Easy dodge, don’t you see?  Yellow sky and purple hill, and short streak for the steamboat and its wake, and a smear of white steam straggling behind.  Sam does ’em as well as anybody.  Sometimes he puts in a pile or two in the foreground for a broken dock and a rowboat with a lone fisherman squatting on the hind seat.  Then he asks five dollars more.  Always get more you know for figures in a landscape.”

He had unwrapped the canvas by this time, and was holding it to the light of the window that Felix might see it better.

Felix studied it carefully, even to the cramped signature in the corner, “Samuel Dogger, A. N. A.”; and with an appreciative smile said:  “Very good, I should say.  Yes, very good.”

“Good!  It’s really very bad, and you know it.  So do I. But you’re too much of a gentleman to say so.  Can’t be worse, really, but ‘puttying up’ is down by the heels, and there hasn’t been an old master from Flushing, Long Island, or Weehawken, New Jersey, lugged up our stairs for a month;—­two months, really.  We had one last week from a dealer down-town which turned out to be genuine after Sam had looked it over.  And, of course, Sam wouldn’t touch it and sent for the auctioneer and told him so.  And the beggar made Sam hunt for the signature and Sam found it at the top of the canvas instead of at the bottom.  One of the early Dutchmen Sam said it was.  Some kind of a Beck or a Koven.  And would you believe it, the very next day the fellow got a whacking price for it from a collector up in one of the side streets near the Park.  So Sam has gone back to the early American school.  This means that he’s getting down to his last five-dollar bill, and I want to tell you that I’m not far from it myself.  I’d have been dead broke if I hadn’t sold two Fatimas.  One in pink pants and the other a flying angel in summer clothes to fit an alcove in an up-town barroom over the cigar-stand.