d lazily against the
back of the chair and considered the arrivals with emotionless eyes.
She held a book in her lap with her finger holding the place.

Sam shook himself queerly, like a man coming out of a dream, and slowly
dismounted. He moistened his dry lips.

"I see you are still a-settin'," he said, "a-readin' of them
billy-by-dam yaller-back novils."

Sam had traveled round the circle and was himself again.

THE RUBBER PLANT'S STORY

We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom
and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue
theatre. I haven't looked up our family tree, but I believe we were
raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d'hote stalk of
asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of
independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna
and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant
is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one
place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture
taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting
fig tree. You know the proverb: "Where the rubber plant sits in the
window the moving van draws up to the door."

We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No
other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much
handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a
flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates,
fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of "Home Sweet Home." We aren't as
green as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the
soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the front window of
a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day, and
back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not--hey?
Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of
Eden--say! suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve--but I
was going to tell you a story.

The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to
a member of the pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window, and was
generally watered with seltzer and lemon. I had plenty of fun in those
days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the automobiles
in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time.

Well, then the angel that was molting for the music