into hard knots just to
improve their appearance. We sat on the chairs, not on their appearance.
During our talks Jim did the listening. This constituted a _de facto_
conversation. His knowledge of Gorley and up-State affairs, after an
absence of ten years, was well maintained by regularly reading the
county papers, but his knowledge of monopoly and our foreign affairs
came wholly from me while we would sit and cure the air of our front
room with our smoking corncobs. And dad, who used them in his
smokehouse, used to say they beat sawdust for flavor. We mixed a little
short-cut tobacco to sweeten the cob. This was not our ideal way of
spending the evening, for we had a Perfecto ambition. For ten years,
though, we had been gradually squeezing ourselves to fit circumstances
and had come to realize that the pipe and kerosene oil are the cheapest
fuel and light the trusts offer in New York. A gallon of oil a week, a
pound of tobacco and seven scuttles of coal stood us in for our quota of
comfort, and as we paid our humble tributes to the concerns that had
cornered these articles we were happy in the thought that it wasn't as
bad as it might be. They had not yet cornered the air necessary to
oxidize these commodities, although they had the connecting link, the
match, and would no doubt soon get the air.

We perched there in the top flat after a long trial of the abnormalities
of boarding-house life. I heard them called that once and it seemed to
me that it fitted. We were fairly cosy, although, as I have hinted,
there was nothing over-ornate about the furnishings. No woman had ever
seen the place and therefore our ideas as to keeping it always the same
were never disturbed, and it had never been spoken ill of. In the winter
we kept house with more system than we did in the summer, when
dish-washing became too much of a burden and appetite dwindled to
chipped beef and angel cake, two simple things to serve. We got fagged
out in this climate in the summer, and if you had been born in
Oswegatchie County, where forty degrees below zero is as common as at
the North Pole, and had then lived up there beneath the roof of that
flat, you would understand. In all our wanderings through the art
galleries and the comic papers we had never found an artist who could
draw the sun like that tin roof.

Jim was almost as much interested as I was in having no harm come to the
government, but not quite. We both worked for the city, holding civi