--the fretting steeds with their glittering
equipment. Around the coach had already gathered several small boys,
huddled together, and transfixed with awe too deep for impudence.

Carroll, having greeted the men, said good-morning urbanely to the
barber, who had ceased lathering Tappan and was looking at him
indeterminately. It seemed dreadful to him that this great man should
have to wait for the milkman. The barber was a conservative to the
core, and would speak of the laboring-classes and tradesmen as if he
himself were on the other side of the highway from birth. Tappan
himself, who, as said before, was naturally surly, was also a
dissenter on principle, and had an enlarged sense of injury, had
qualms at keeping waiting a man who patronized him to the extent of
two quarts of cream and three quarts of milk daily. It was like
quarrelling with his bread-and-butter, as he put it, when alluding to
the affair later on.

"I ain't goin' through the world seein' no men as is better 'n I be,"
he said, "but there's jest this much about it, I ain't a fool, an' I
know enough to open the door when a man wants to walk through to pay
me some money. Ef Carroll hadn't been takin' that much cream and
milk, I'd set there in that barber's-chair ef I'd had a year's beard
to shave, an' I'd kept him waitin', and enjoyed it, but, as it was, I
did what I did."

What Tappan did was to wave back Flynn's lathering-hand, and to say,
rather splutteringly, that he would wait, "ef Captain Carroll was in
a hurry."

But Captain Carroll was in no hurry, it seemed, and, moreover, gave
the impression that if he had been about to catch a railroad train to
keep an important business engagement, he would not have dreamed of
thrusting himself in before the milkman with his milk all delivered.
He, moreover, gave the impression that he considered the milkman a
polished gentleman for his handsome offer, and all this without
saying so much. Captain Carroll seated himself, and completed the
impression by tendering everybody cigars. Then the "Tonsorial Parlor"
and its patrons waiting for a Sunday-morning shave became a truly
genteel function. Willy Eddy, who was dreamily imaginative, and read
the Sunday papers when his Minna gave him a chance and did not chide
him for the waste of money, remembered things he had read about the
swagger New York clubs. He smoked away and made-believe he was a
clubman, and enjoyed himself artlessly. The sun got farther around