hat
money will buy.'"

Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley perceived that
his audience was drawing to a close. "'F you ever want to run down and
take a look at our works, pass you over the road,"--he called it
RUD--"and it sha'n't cost you a cent." "Well, may be I shall,
sometime," said Bartley. "Good afternoon, Colonel."

"Good afternoon. Or--hold on! My horse down there yet, William?" he
called to the young man in the counting-room who had taken his letter
at the beginning of the interview. "Oh! All right!" he added, in
response to something the young man said.

"Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard? I've got my horse at the
door, and I can drop you on my way home. I'm going to take Mis' Lapham
to look at a house I'm driving piles for, down on the New Land."

"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.

Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying on his desk,
pulled down its rolling cover, turned the key in it, and gave the
papers to an extremely handsome young woman at one of the desks in the
outer office. She was stylishly dressed, as Bartley saw, and her
smooth, yellow hair was sculpturesquely waved over a low, white
forehead. "Here," said Lapham, with the same prompt gruff kindness
that he had used in addressing the young man, "I want you should put
these in shape, and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow."

"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley, as they descended the
rough stairway and found their way out to the street, past the dangling
rope of a block and tackle wandering up into the cavernous darkness
overhead.

"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.

Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing at the
curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-weight, slid it under
the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.

"No chance to speed a horse here, of course," said Lapham, while the
horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way, with a high, long
action, over the pavement of the street. The streets were all narrow,
and most of them crooked, in that quarter of the town; but at the end
of one the spars of a vessel pencilled themselves delicately against
the cool blue of the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell
pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil. It was not the
busy season, and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling
toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the cobble-stones of
the pave