father was
here before me,--buying and selling whatever comes to us. And things do
come to us sure, from copper kettles that would serve a mess of sixty men,
down to babies' bonnets."

"Babies' bonnets!" laughed Dan, who, with Freddy close behind him, had
pushed curiously but cautiously into the low, dark room, from which opened
another and another, crowded with strangely assorted merchandise.

"You may laugh," said the proprietor, "but we've had more than a dozen
trunks and boxes filled with such like folderols. Some of 'em been here
twenty years or more,--shawls and bonnets and ball dresses, all frills and
laces and ribbons; baby bonnets, too, all held for duty and storage or
wreckage and land knows what. Flung the whole lot out for auction last
year, and the women swarmed like bees from the big hotels and the
cottages. Got bits of yellow lace, they said, for ten cents that was worth
many dollars. The men folks tried to 'kick' about fever and small-pox in
the old stuff, but not a woman would listen. Look at that now!" And the
speaker paused under a chandelier that, even in the dusky dimness,
glittered with crystal pendants. "Set that ablaze with the fifty candles
it was made to hold, and I bet a hundred dollars wouldn't have touched it
forty years ago. Ye can buy it to-morrow for three and a quarter. That's
the way things go in Jonah's junk-shop."

"And do you ever really sell anything?" asked Dan, whose keen business
eye, being trained by early bargaining for the sharp needs of life, could
see nothing in Jonah's collection worth a hard-earned dollar. Mirrors with
dingy and broken frames loomed ghost-like up in the dusky corners;
tarnished epaulets and sword hilts told pathetically of forgotten honors;
there were clocks, tall and stately, without works or pendulum.

"Sell?" echoed the proprietor. "Of course, sonny, we sell considerable,
specially this time of year when the rich folks come around,--folks that
ain't looking for stuff that's whole or shiny. And they do bite curious,
sure. Why, there was some sort of a big man come up here in his yacht a
couple of years ago that gave me twenty-five dollars for a furrin
medal,--twenty-five dollars cash down. And it wasn't gold or silver
neither. Said he knew what it was worth, and I didn't."

"Twenty-five dollars!" exclaimed the astonished Freddy,--"twenty-five
dollars for a medal! O Dan, then maybe yours is worth something, too."

"Pooh, no!" said Dan, "what would po