e up under the roof."

"What is the number?"

"It isn't any number. It's half a number. We live in the half that isn't
numbered; the other half gets the number."

"And you take your music lessons in one half?"

"Why, yes, Mister. Why not?"

"On a piano?"

"Why, yes, Mister; on _my_ piano."

"Oh, you have a piano, have you?"

"There isn't any sound in about half the keys. Granny says the time has
come to rent a better one. She has gone over to the art school to-day to
pose to get the money."

A chill of silence fell between the talkers, the one looking up and the
other looking down. The man's next question was put in a more guarded
tone:

"Does your mother pose as a model?"

"No, Mister, she doesn't pose as a model. She's posing as herself. She
said I must have a teacher. Mister, were _you_ ever poor?"

The man looked the boy over from head to foot.

"Do you think you are poor?" he asked.

The good-natured reply came back in a droll tone:

"Well, Mister, we certainly aren't rich."

"Let us see," objected the man, as though this were a point which had
better not be yielded, and he began with a voice of one reckoning up
items: "Two feet, each cheap at, say, five millions. Two hands--five
millions apiece for hands. At least ten millions for each eye. About
the same for the ears. Certainly twenty millions for your teeth. Forty
millions for your stomach. On the whole, at a rough estimate you must
easily be worth over one hundred millions. There are quite a number of
old gentlemen in New York, and a good many young ones, who would gladly
pay that amount for your investments, for your securities."

The lad with eager upturned countenance did not conceal his amusement
while the man drew this picture of him as a living ragged gold-mine, as
actually put together and made up of pieces of fabulous treasure. A
child's notion of wealth is the power to pay for what it has not. The
wealth that childhood _is_, escapes childhood; it does not escape the
old. What most concerned the lad as to these priceless feet and hands
and eyes and ears was the hard-knocked-in fact that many a time he
ached throughout this reputed treasury of his being for a five-cent
piece, and these reputed millionaires, acting together and doing their
level best, could not produce one.

Nevertheless, this fresh and never-before-imagined image of his
self-riches amused him. It somehow put him over into the class of
enormously opulent things; an