t was said. They asked father if he was
going to New York _soon_? He said, in about ten days. Then Mrs.
Marigold confided to him that they wanted him to purchase twenty-five
yards of white corded silk.

If every cord in that whole piece of silk had been drawing about my
throat I couldn't have felt more suffocated. I sat right down, I felt
so faint, in a tub of butter. I had just sense enough left to remember
that I had on my new spring lavender pants. The butter was
disgustingly soft and mushy.

"Come here, John, and add up this bill," called father.

"I can't; I'm sick."

I had got up from the tub and was leaning on the counter--I was pale,
I know.

"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.

Belle cast one guilty look in my direction. "It's the spring weather,
I dare say," she said softly to my parent.

I sneaked out of the back door and went across the yard to the house
to change my pants. I _was_ sick, and I did not emerge from my room
until the dinner-bell rang.

I went down then, and found father, usually so good-natured, looking
cross, as he carved the roast beef.

"You will never be good for anything, John," was his salutation--"at
least, not as a clerk. I've a good mind to write to Captain Hall to
take you to the North Pole."

"What's up, father?"

"Oh, nothing!" _very_ sarcastically. "That white sugar you sent Mrs.
Smith was table-salt, and she made a whole batch of cake out of it
before she discovered her mistake. She was out of temper when she flew
in the store, I tell you. I had not only to give her the sugar, but
enough butter and eggs to make good her loss, and throw in a neck-tie
to compensate her for waste of time. Before she got away, in came the
mother of the little girl to whom you had given a slab of molasses
candy for bar-soap, and said that the child had brought nothing home
but some streaks of molasses on her face. Just as I was coming out to
dinner the other boy brought back the porcelain eggs you had given him
with word that 'Ma had biled 'em an hour, and she couldn't even budge
the shells.' So you see, my son, that in a miscellaneous store you are
quite out of your element."

"It was that flirt of a Belle Marigold that upset him," said mother,
laughing so that she spilled the gravy on the table-cloth. "He'll be
all right when she is once Mrs. Hencoop."

That very evening Fred came in the store to ask me to be his
groomsman.

"We're going to be married the first of June," he told m