sand dollar line on coffee in one of those
Brooklyn shorefront warehouses. I guess all the other offices must
have shut up, for Herman never gave me anything he didn't have to. He
banged on the door, and I let him in, and the risk was all right and we
were wide open, and I took his ten thousand. . . . And about twenty
minutes later, as I stood on the front deck of the Wall Street
ferryboat crossing the river, the flames burst out of the roof of that
warehouse, and we paid nine thousand two hundred and thirty-seven
dollars for that coffee. . . . This office closes at five P.M."

This was his superstition, and he lived up to it with absolute
consistency. His one grievance was not quite so deep, which probably
explained his lesser insistence upon it. This grievance was simply
that the conservative policy of the company would not let him accept
more than a fraction of what he would have wished to write on the
island of Manhattan. Like all men who constantly live in the presence
of a peril and grow thus to minimize it, Mr. Cuyler had grown to think
and to feel that New York, _his_ New York, could never have a serious,
sweeping fire, a conflagration. This being so, and the local business
being profitable, to write so small an amount in the city was
equivalent to throwing money sinfully away. Why, companies not half so
large were doing double the Guardian's business, and with golden
results. But only at long intervals did he permit himself the luxury
of articulately bemoaning his fate, for in spite of his own conviction
he felt that any implied criticism of his chief was disloyal.
Occasionally, however, his feelings would overcome him, and then he
would burst forth into a hurricane of lamentations.

"The finest town in the country," he would say; "and look at what we
write! I could double our income in a week if the old man would let
me. But he won't. He keeps talking 'conflagration hazard' and 'keep
your lines down in the dry goods district' and 'aggregate liability,'
and I can't get him to loosen up a particle. He always says we have
enough at risk now. Enough at risk! Look at what the company writes
in Boston! Why, the Guardian must have half as much at risk in the
congested district of Boston as I write here! And Boston! Of all
towns in the world!"

Mr. Cuyler was not a Bostonian.

It was perfectly true; Mr. Wintermuth was not a strictly consistent
underwriter, and perhaps some day he would adopt Mr.