ith a shout and rescue them just
before the crash came, and set them deftly off again in the opposite
direction.

"This I must have for my boy in New York." He held up a miniature hook
and ladder. "And this windmill that whirls so busily. My Leo is seven,
and his head is full of engines, and motors, and things that run on
wheels. He cares no more for music, the little savage, than the son of a
bricklayer."

"Who is that man?" Fanny whispered, staring at him.

"Levine Schabelitz."

"Schabelitz! Not the--"

"Yes."

"But he's playing on the floor like--like a little boy! And laughing!
Why, Mother, he's just like anybody else, only nicer."

If Fanny had been more than fourteen her mother might have told her that
all really great people are like that, finding joy in simple things. I
think that is the secret of their genius--the child in them that keeps
their viewpoint fresh, and that makes us children again when we listen
to them. It is the Schabelitzes of this world who can shout over a toy
engine that would bore a Bauer to death.

Fanny stood looking at him thoughtfully. She knew all about him.
Theodore's talk of the past week had accomplished that. Fanny knew that
here was a man who did one thing better than any one else in the world.
She thrilled to that thought. She adored the quality in people that
caused them to excel. Schabelitz had got hold of a jack-in-the-box, and
each time the absurd head popped out, with its grin and its squawk, he
laughed like a boy. Fanny, standing behind the wrapping counter, and
leaning on it with her elbows the better to see this great man, smiled
too, as her flexible spirit and her mobile mind caught his mood. She did
not know she was smiling. Neither did she know why she suddenly frowned
in the intensity of her concentration, reached up for one of the pencils
on the desk next the wrapping counter, and bent over the topmost sheet
of yellow wrapping paper that lay spread out before her. Her tongue-tip
curled excitedly at one corner of her mouth. Her head was cocked to one
side.

She was rapidly sketching a crude and startling likeness of Levine
Schabelitz as he stood there with the ridiculous toy in his hand. It
was a trick she often amused herself with at school. She had drawn her
school-teacher one day as she had looked when gazing up into the eyes of
the visiting superintendent, who was a married man. Quite innocently
and unconsciously she had caught the adoring look in the e