ronizin' if
he finds the grocery business int'restin'. He admits that he does.

"How odd!" says Aunty. "But I presume that you hope to retire very
soon?"

"Eh?" says he. "Quit the one thing I can do best? Why?"

"But surely," she goes on, "you can hardly find such a business
congenial. It is so--so--well, so petty and sordid?"

"Is it, though?" says Wiggins. "With more than five thousand employees
on my payroll and a daily expense bill running well over thirty
thousand, I find it far from petty. Anyway, it keeps me hustling. I used
to think I was a hard worker too, when I had my one little general store
at Smiths Corners."

"And now you've nearly a hundred stores!" says Aunty. "How did you do
it?"

"I was kicked into doing it, I guess," says Wiggins, smilin' grim. "The
manufacturers and jobbers, you know. They weren't willing to allow me a
fair profit. So I had to go under or spread out. Well, I've
spread,--flour mills in Minnesota, canning factories from Portland,
Oregon, to Bridgeton, Maine, potato farms in Michigan and the Aroostook,
cracker and bread bakeries, creameries, raisin and prune
plantations,--all that sort of thing,--until gradually I've weeded out
most of the greedy middlemen who stood between me and my customers.
They're poor folks, most of 'em, and when they trade with me their slim
wages go further than in most stores. My ambition is to give them honest
goods at a five per cent. profit.

"If they all knew what was best for them, the Wiggins stores would soon
become a national institution, and I could hand it over to the federal
government; but they don't. If they did, I suppose they wouldn't be
working for wages. So my chain grows slowly, at the rate of two or three
stores a year. But every Wiggins store is a center for economic and
scientific distribution of pure food products. That's my job, and I find
it neither petty nor sordid. I can even get a certain satisfaction and
pride from it. Incidentally there is my five per cent. profit to be
made, which makes the game fascinating. Retire? Not until I've found
something better to do, and up to date I haven't."

Havin' got this off his mind and the parcels done up, Mr. Wiggins walks
back to answer the 'phone.

When he comes out again, in a minute or so, he's shucked the jumper and
is buttonin' himself into a mink-lined overcoat.

"As a rule," says he, "we do not deliver goods; but in this instance I
beg leave to make an exception. Permit me,"