'."

Felix whistled.

"Five hundred? Pork-chops must be coming high. You don't want to carry
all that money around, do you?"

Gideon did not answer; he looked very gloomy.

Stuhk hastened to cheer him.

"Of course you can have anything you want. Wait a minute, and I will
get it for you.

"I'll bet that coon's going to buy himself a ring or something," he
reflected as he went in search of the local manager and Gideon's
money.

But Stuhk was wrong. Gideon had no intention of buying himself a ring.
For the matter of that, he had several that were amply satisfactory.
They had size and sparkle and luster, all the diamond brilliance that
rings need to have; and for none of them had he paid much over five
dollars. He was amply supplied with jewelry in which he felt perfect
satisfaction. His present want was positive, if nebulous; he desired a
fortune in his pocket, bulky, tangible evidence of his miraculous
success. Ever since Stuhk had found him, life had had an unreal
quality for him. His Monte Cristo wealth was too much like a fabulous,
dream-found treasure, money that could not be spent without danger of
awakening. And he had dropped into the habit of storing it about him,
so that in any pocket into which he plunged his hand he might find a
roll of crisp evidence of reality. He liked his bills to be of all
denominations, and some so large as exquisitely to stagger
imagination, others charming by their number and crispness--the
dignified, orange paper of a man of assured position and
wealth-crackling greenbacks the design of which tinged the whole with
actuality. He was specially partial to engravings of President
Lincoln, the particular savior and patron of his race. This five
hundred dollars he was adding to an unreckoned sum of about two
thousand, merely as extra fortification against a growing sense of
gloom. He wished to brace his flagging spirits with the gay wine of
possession, and he was glad, when the money came, that it was in an
elastic-bound roll, so bulky that it was pleasantly uncomfortable in
his pocket as he left his manager.

As he turned into the brilliantly lighted street from the somber
alleyway of the stage entrance, he paused for a moment to glance at
his own name, in three-foot letters of red, before the doors of the
theater. He could read, and the large block type always pleased him.
"THIS WEEK: GIDEON." That was all. None of the fulsome praise, the
superlative, necessary definition given