e to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a
return to the sourness of his earlier mood. "I don't know as I care much
for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him." He
clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and
started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and
physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking
at Burnamy, "You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."

Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to
the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race
and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana
town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could
remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese
and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great
a price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and
tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in
mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to
fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and
mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time
till they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the
exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,
rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;
and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed
upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his
native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with
his father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who
proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in
de Dytchman's house." He disused it so thoroughly that after his father
took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he
could not get back to it. He regarded his father's business as part of
his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away
from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith
and wagon-maker. When it came to his setting up for himself in the
business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on
adding dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
many of them come to