lunch, and
when he entered the building on his return a familiar, bulky figure
preceded him into the doorway.

"Hallo!" Abe cried, and the bulky figure stopped and turned around.

"Hallo yourself!" he said.

"You don't know me, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe went on.

"Why, how d'ye do, Mr. Potash?" Feigenbaum exclaimed. "What brings you
way uptown here?"

"We m----" Abe commenced--"that is to say, I come up here to see a
party. I bet yer we're going to the same place, Mr. Feigenbaum."

"Maybe," Mr. Feigenbaum grunted.

"Sixth floor, hey?" Abe cried jocularly, slapping Mr. Feigenbaum on
the shoulder.

Mr. Feigenbaum's right eye assumed the glassy stare which was permanent
in his left.

"What business is that from yours, Potash?" he asked.

"Excuse me, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said with less jocularity, "I didn't
mean it no harm."

Together they entered the elevator, and Abe created a diversion by
handing Mr. Feigenbaum a large, black cigar with a wide red-and-gold
band on it. While Feigenbaum was murmuring his thanks the elevator man
stopped the car at the fifth floor.

"Here we are!" Abe cried, and hustled out of the elevator ahead of Mr.
Feigenbaum. He opened the outer door of Potash & Perlmutter's loft with
such rapidity that there was no time for Feigenbaum to decipher the sign
on its ground-glass panel, and the next moment they stood before the
green-baize swinging doors.

"After you, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said. He followed his late customer up
the passageway between the mahogany partitions, into the show-room.

"Take a chair, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe cried, dragging forward a
comfortable, padded seat, into which Feigenbaum sank with a sigh.

"I wish we could get it furniture like this up in Bridgetown,"
Feigenbaum said. "A one-horse place like Bridgetown you can't get
nothing there. Everything you got to come to New York for. We are dead
ones in Bridgetown. We don't know nothing and we don't learn nothing."

"That's right, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said. "You got to come to New York
to get the latest wrinkles about everything."

With one comprehensive motion he drew forward a chair for himself and
waved a warning to Morris, who ducked behind a rack of cloaks in the
rear of the show-room.

"You make yourself to home here, Potash, I must say," Feigenbaum
observed.

Abe grunted inarticulately and handed a match to Feigenbaum, who lit his
cigar, a fine imported one, and blew out great clouds of smoke with
every evid