g the great sugar refineries, on the
Long Island side of the East River; and then another among the tea and
coffee merchants and brokers, away down town, looking at samples of all
sorts and finding out how cargoes were unloaded from ships and were
bought and sold among the dealers. He brought to the store, that
afternoon, before six o'clock, about forty samples of all kinds of
grocery goods, all labeled with prices and places, and he was going on
to talk about them when Mr. Gifford stopped him.

"There, Ogden," he said. "I know all about these myself,--but where
did you find that coffee? I want some. And this tea?--It is two cents
lower than I'm paying. Jones, he's found just the tea you and I were
talking of--" and so he went on carefully examining the other samples,
and out of them all there were seven different articles that Gifford &
Company bought largely next day.

"Jones," said Mr. Gifford, when he came back from buying them, "they
had our card in each place, and told me, 'Your Mr. Ogden was in here
yesterday. We took him for a boy at first.'--I'm beginning to think
there are some things that only that kind of boy can do. I'll just let
him go ahead in his own way."

Mary had told Jack all about her daily experiences in her letters to
him, and he said to himself more than once:

"Dudley Edwards must be a tip-top fellow. It's good of him to drive
Mary over to Crofield and back every Saturday. And they have had such
good sleighing all winter. I wish I could try some of it."

There was no going to Crofield for him. When Thanksgiving Day came, he
could not afford it, and before the Christmas holidays Mr. Gifford told
him:

"We can't spare you at Christmas, Ogden. It's the busiest time for us
in the whole year."

Mr. Gifford was an exacting master, and he kept Jack at it all through
the following spring and summer. Mary had a good rest during the hot
weather, but Jack did not. One thing that seemed strange to her was
that so many of the Crofield ladies called to see her, and that Miss
Glidden was more and more inclined to suggest that Mary's election had
been mainly due to her own influence in Mertonville.

On the other hand, it seemed to Jack that summer, as if everybody he
knew was out of the city. Business kept pressing him harder and
harder, and all the plans he made to get a leave of absence for that
second year's Thanksgiving Day failed to work successfully.

The Christmas holidays cam