ilkins looked at it sorrowfully.

"After all," he said, "I don't believe that just money alone will--"

And then he gave a shout and dug into the bottom of the box for
something else that had been the kitten's resting-place--a crushed
but red, red, fragrant, glorious, promising Jacqueminot rose.

IV

THE ENCHANTED PROFILE

There are few Caliphesses. Women are Scheherazades by birth,
predilection, instinct, and arrangement of the vocal cords. The
thousand and one stories are being told every day by hundreds of
thousands of viziers' daughters to their respective sultans. But
the bowstring will get some of 'em yet if they don't watch out.

I heard a story, though, of one lady Caliph. It isn't precisely
an Arabian Nights story, because it brings in Cinderella, who
flourished her dishrag in another epoch and country. So, if you
don't mind the mixed dates (which seem to give it an Eastern
flavour, after all), we'll get along.

In New York there is an old, old hotel. You have seen woodcuts of
it in the magazines. It was built--let's see--at a time when there
was nothing above Fourteenth Street except the old Indian trail
to Boston and Hammerstein's office. Soon the old hostelry will be
torn down. And, as the stout walls are riven apart and the bricks
go roaring down the chutes, crowds of citizens will gather at
the nearest corners and weep over the destruction of a dear old
landmark. Civic pride is strongest in New Bagdad; and the wettest
weeper and the loudest howler against the iconoclasts will be the
man (originally from Terre Haute) whose fond memories of the old
hotel are limited to his having been kicked out from its free-lunch
counter in 1873.

At this hotel always stopped Mrs. Maggie Brown. Mrs. Brown was a
bony woman of sixty, dressed in the rustiest black, and carrying a
handbag made, apparently, from the hide of the original animal that
Adam decided to call an alligator. She always occupied a small
parlour and bedroom at the top of the hotel at a rental of two
dollars per day. And always, while she was there, each day came
hurrying to see her many men, sharp-faced, anxious-looking, with
only seconds to spare. For Maggie Brown was said to be the third
richest woman in the world; and these solicitous gentlemen were only
the city's wealthiest brokers and business men seeking trifling
loans of half a dozen millions or so from the dingy old lady with
the prehistoric handbag.

The stenographer and typ