ter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic,
finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine
thousand dollars. He signed the new contract, inserting "The Smoke of
Joy" in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with
the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the
formula for the newspaper storiette. And promptly as the United States
mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.'s check for
five thousand dollars.

"I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two
o'clock," Martin said, the morning the check arrived. "Or, better, meet
me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o'clock. I'll be looking out for
you."

At the appointed time she was there; but _shoes_ was the only clew to the
mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a
distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-
store and dived into a real estate office. What happened thereupon
resided forever after in her memory as a dream. Fine gentlemen smiled at
her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a
type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document; her
own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when all was
over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her,
saying, "Well, Maria, you won't have to pay me no seven dollars and a
half this month."

Maria was too stunned for speech.

"Or next month, or the next, or the next," her landlord said.

She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And it was not until
she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind,
and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she
was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for which
she had paid rent so long.

"Why don't you trade with me no more?" the Portuguese grocer asked Martin
that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car; and
Martin explained that he wasn't doing his own cooking any more, and then
went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He noted it was the best
wine the grocer had in stock.

"Maria," Martin announced that night, "I'm going to leave you. And
you're going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can rent the house
and be a landlord yourself. You've a brother in San Leandro or Haywards,
and he's in the milk business. I want you to send all your wa