Elder Brown leaned over the little pine picket which divided the
bookkeepers' department of a Macon warehouse from the room in general,
and surveyed the well-dressed back of a gentleman who was busily
figuring at a desk within. The apartment was carpetless, and the dust
of a decade lay deep on the old books, shelves, and the familiar
advertisements of guano and fertilizers which decorated the room. An
old stove, rusty with the nicotine contributed by farmers during the
previous season while waiting by its glowing sides for their cotton to
be sold, stood straight up in a bed of sand, and festoons of cobwebs
clung to the upper sashes of the murky windows. The lower sash of one
window had been raised, and in the yard without, nearly an acre in
extent, lay a few bales of cotton, with jagged holes in their ends,
just as the sampler had left them. Elder Brown had time to notice all
these familiar points, for the figure at the desk kept serenely at its
task, and deigned no reply.

"Good-mornin', sir," said Elder Brown again, in his most dignified
tones. "Is Mr. Thomas in?"

"Good-morning, sir," said the figure. "I'll wait on you in a minute."
The minute passed, and four more joined it. Then the desk man turned.

"Well, sir, what can I do for you?"

The elder was not in the best of humor when he arrived, and his state
of mind had not improved. He waited full a minute as he surveyed the
man of business.

"I thought I mout be able to make some arrangements with you to git