ce and neck. "Poor Mrs. Tony," they would say, and
nestle close to her. Tony did not roar at her for petting them,
perhaps, because they spent money on the multi-hued candy in glass jars
on the shelves.

Her mother appeared upon the scene once, and stayed a short time; but
Tony got drunk one day and beat her because she ate too much, and she
disappeared soon after. Whence she came and where she departed, no one
could tell, not even Mrs. Murphy, the Pauline Pry and Gazette of the
block.

Tony had gout, and suffered for many days in roaring helplessness, the
while his foot, bound and swathed in many folds of red flannel, lay on
the chair before him. In proportion as his gout increased and he
bawled from pure physical discomfort, she became light-hearted, and
moved about the shop with real, brisk cheeriness. He could not hit her
then without such pain that after one or two trials he gave up in
disgust.

So the dull years had passed, and life had gone on pretty much the same
for Tony and the German wife and the shop. The children came on Sunday
evenings to buy the stick candy, and on week-days for coal and wood.
The servants came to buy oysters for the larger houses, and to gossip
over the counter about their employers. The little dry woman knitted,
and the big man moved lazily in and out in his red flannel shirt,
exchanged politics with the tailor next door through the window, or
lounged into Mrs. Murphy's bar and drank fiercely. Some of the
children grew up and moved away, and other little girls came to buy
candy and eat pink lagniappe fishes, and the shop still thrived.

One day Tony was ill, more than the mummied foot of gout, or the wheeze
of asthma; he must keep his bed and send for the doctor.

She clutched his arm when he came, and pulled him into the tiny room.

"Is it--is it anything much, doctor?" she gasped.

AEsculapius shook his head as wisely as the occasion would permit. She
followed him out of the room into the shop.

"Do you--will he get well, doctor?"

AEsculapius buttoned up his frock coat, smoothed his shining hat,
cleared his throat, then replied oracularly,

"Madam, he is completely burned out inside. Empty as a shell, madam,
empty as a shell. He cannot live, for he has nothing to live on."

As the cobblestones rattled under the doctor's equipage rolling
leisurely up Prytania Street, Tony's wife sat in her chair and
laughed,--laughed with a hearty joyousness that lifted the fil