laces from time to time, while
Mrs. Leeth sorted, and the hardware lord actually jotted down her notes
as to necessary darning and replacing, in a worn red account book--it
was almost too quaint for belief! He chuckled at it a little, but not
much; it was, after all, such a practical, sane sort of interlude in
all the horrid, morbid confusion that the place, with all its
conservatories and old mahogany and spacious vistas, necessarily
included. They were more than common normal, this simple, middle-class
pair, on their friendly little housekeeping island, with this
treacherous sea of pain and revolt forever lapping at the edges.

I don't remember how he got to telling me of his early life, but I
believe it is a habit of all that sort, and Absolom was no exception to
his class and stratum. I was particularly impressed by one little
incident, the foundation, really, of his fortune--if any event can be
selected in those lives which seem destined to exhibit the farthest
possibilities of accumulation.

"I had just exactly one hundred dollars," he said (he had the
characteristic superstitious reverence for set sums, even decimal
multiples of the national symbol) "that I'd saved up as carpenter's
assistant in Greenwich, Connecticut. I took it out of the savings-bank
and I came to New York with a clean shirt and a tooth brush and my old
mother's Bible, packed in a little basket with some boiled ham and
bread. I looked out a verse just as I stepped onto the train--what do
you think it was?"

"I have no idea, Mr. Vail."

"No. You wouldn't have. Well, it was this: _Blessed shall be thy
basket and thy store. D'you see--basket_! And I always intended to
keep a store."

He fixed me triumphantly with his twinkling Santa Claus eyes.

"It's in Deuteronomy," he said.

"The coincidence must have seemed very comforting to you," I suggested
gravely.

"It did. It did," he answered, "and from that moment on, I never had a
doubt. Barkington didn't care much for that story, though--he says
that the old fellows that translated the Bible away back in some king's
time--King----"

"King James," said the housekeeper quietly.

"Yes, King James. Well, he says that they didn't mean that kind of a
store. Maybe not. But it did the job for me, that verse, just the
same."

The whole incident seemed very characteristic, very national, somehow,
and I reflected gently upon it as we sat in silence, broken only by
Mrs. Leeth's prac