there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade.
And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paper
spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but away
from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when she
wasn't working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbows
on the table reading Marie Corelli--only now, of course, after the
fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools.

So this night,--I don't know just what it was in the paper that caused
it,--Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about
Carnegie.

"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth," said Jeff, closing up his
eyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you was
to sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, to
sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"

I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if
you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold
up, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test him.

"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on. "They make their money and what do
they do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to? Why, to
those as don't want it, every time. They give it to these professors and
to this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent and
never will."

"I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in
Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary
audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this
Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into a
hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that
hadn't nothing."

So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown
for.

Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions
directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. He
asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take to
fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them.
And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some of
these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing.
I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a document
that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot in
Missinaba county.

But stil