e
sometime," he growled. "I want to git home an' git my breakfast. I'm
hungry."

Flynn began hurriedly finishing off Rosenstein, talking with no less
eagerness as he did so. "Well, it's Bonaflora mining-stock, ef you
want to know," he said, importantly.

"Where is it?" asked the postmaster, with a peculiar smile.

"Out West somewhere. It ain't but fifty cents a share, an' it's goin'
up like a skyrocket, an' there's others. There's a new railroad out
there, an' other mines, an' a new invention for makin' fuel out of
coal-dust, an' some other things."

"Is Captain Carroll the president of them?" asked the small man, with
an impressed air. He was very young, and eager-looking, and very
shabby. He grubbed on a tiny ancestral farm, for a living for himself
and wife and four children, young as he was. He had never had enough
to eat, at least of proper food. He did not come to the "Tonsorial
Parlor" to be shaved, for he hacked away at his innocent cheeks at
home with his deceased father's old razor, but he loved a little
gossip. In fact, John Flynn's barber-shop was his one dissipation.
Sometimes he looked longingly at a beer-saloon, but he had no money,
unless he starved Minna and the children, and for that he was too
good and too timid. His Minna was a stout German girl, twice his
size, and she ruled him with a rod of iron. She did not approve of
the barber-shop, and so the pleasure had something of the zest of a
forbidden one.

Every Sunday he was at his wit's end, which was easily reached, to
invent a suitable excuse for his absence. To-day it had been to see
if Mrs. Amidon did not want to buy some apples. Some of their last
winter's store had been miraculously preserved, and Minna saw the way
to a few pennies thereby. He could quite openly say that he had been
to the barber-shop to-day, having seen Amidon there, therefore he was
quite easy in his mind, and leaned back in his chair with perfect
content. One of the children at home cried all the time. A yawning
mouth of wrath at existence was about all he ever saw of that
particular baby, and Minna almost always scolded, and this was a
haven of peace to little Willy Eddy.

Here he felt like a man among men; at home he felt like nothing at
all among women. The children were all girls. Sometimes he wondered
if a boy-baby might not have been a refuge. He was not very clean;
his hands were still stained with picking over potatoes the day
before; his shoulders in their