the
following Thursday you meet him again, and he is a car-conductor. Next
week he will be squirting soda in a drug-store. It's the fault of
these dashed magazines, with their advertisements of correspondence
courses--Are You Earning All You Should?--Write To Us and Learn
Chicken-Farming By Mail.... It puts wrong ideas into the fellows'
heads. It unsettles them. It was so in this case. Everything was going
swimmingly, when my man suddenly conceived the idea that destiny had
intended him for a chauffeur-gardener, and he threw up his position!"

"Leaving you homeless!"

"As you say, homeless--temporarily. But, fortunately--I have been
amazingly lucky all through; it really does seem as if you cannot keep
a good man down--fortunately my friend had a friend who was janitor at
a place on East Forty-first Street, and by a miracle of luck the only
apartment in the building was empty. It is an office-building, but,
like some of these places, it has one small bachelor's apartment on
the top floor."

"And you are the small bachelor?"

"Precisely. My friend explained matters to his friend--a few financial
details were satisfactorily arranged--and here I am, perfectly happy
with the cosiest little place in the world, rent free. I am even
better off than I was before, as a matter of fact, for my new ally's
wife is an excellent cook, and I have been enabled to give one or two
very pleasant dinners at my new home. It lends verisimilitude to the
thing if you can entertain a little. If you are never in when people
call, they begin to wonder. I am giving dinner to your friend
Pilkington and Mrs. Peagrim there to-night. Homey, delightful, and
infinitely cheaper than a restaurant."

"And what will you do when the real owner of the place walks in in the
middle of dinner?"

"Out of the question. The janitor informs me that he left for England
some weeks ago, intending to make a stay of several months."

"Well, you certainly think of everything."

"Whatever success I may have achieved," replied Uncle Chris, with the
dignity of a Captain of Industry confiding in an interviewer, "I
attribute to always thinking of everything."

Jill gurgled with laughter. There was that about her uncle which
always acted on her moral sense like an opiate, lulling it to sleep
and preventing it from rising up and becoming critical. If he had
stolen a watch and chain, he would somehow have succeeded in
convincing her that he had acted for the best unde