a meal till he goes.

"I dunno, but if I was a self-made man, I'd hate to have my
autobiography wrote by my poor relations, or the backers I'd cheated and
left on my trail to Fifth Avenue. Them brethren, the Potiphar outfit,
and the jailbirds, is plumb full of grief that they ever seen this
Joseph, and you'll notice that when he dies, the Egyptians don't
subscribe for a monument. He's a city man, a financier, and the Lord is
with him, watching his natural history, this being the first warning of
the plagues of Egypt.

"Thar's only one man as can afford to know the Honorable Joseph. Pharaoh
has an ax, so any gent caught with more'n four aces, is apt to fade away
out of Egypt. Yes, he can afford to know Joseph, and they're birds of a
feather all right.

"Now horses is so scarce that up to now there ain't one in the Bible,
until Pharaoh loans Joseph his second-best chariot, and gives him a sure
fine sleigh-robe to go buggy riding.

"And Jews is scarce. This Pharaoh is the first king to get a Jew
financier to do his graft.

"It ain't the king who pays for that corner in wheat, and you can bet
your socks it's not Joseph. It's the bleeding, sweating, hungry
Egyptians who pays the wheat trust which makes Pharaoh and Joseph
multimillionaires. So there on the high lonesome is the Jew and His
Majesty, with no club of millionaires to tell them they done right, and
nobody in all Egypt left to swindle.

"Old Pharaoh's in a museum now, Joseph is located at Chicago, Egypt is
sand-rock desert; but God's in His Heaven, and judging by the way us
human beings behave, them golden pavements ain't got crowded yet.

"Oh, Lord, Thou knowest that we who ride herd in Thy pastures, haven't
got much to be selfish about on earth. We cayn't make dollars out of Thy
golden sunshine, or currency bills out of Thy silver streams, but all
the same, deliver us from selfishness, and lead us not into the
temptations of a large account at the bank, 'cause we're only kids when
we gets down to civilization, and all our ways is muddy so soon as we
quit Thy grass."

The cow-boys slipped away, no longer hilarious, perhaps even a little
awed, for Jesse's quaint observances are spray from a sea, sparkling on
the surface, but in its depths profound. And we two women waited, the
widow longing for news about her son, while I was concerned for my man.
Hard, bitter, sinister the sermon, humble and reverent the appeal for
help, and now when the men had left us,