on the waiting list. If you don't believe it read our
prospectus!'"

Peter had straightened and was standing with his hand lifted above
his head, as if he were about to pronounce a benediction. Then he
said slowly, and with a note of sadness in his voice:

"Do you wonder, now, my boy, why I touch my hat to His
Excellency?"





CHAPTER II




All the way up Broadway he kept up his good-natured tirade,
railing at the extravagance of the age, at the costly dinners,
equipages, dress of the women, until we reached the foot of the
dilapidated flight of brown-stone steps leading to the front door
of his home on Fifteenth Street. Here a flood of gas light from
inside a shop in the basement brought into view the figure of a
short, squat, spectacled little man bending over a cutting-table,
a pair of shears in his hand.

"Isaac is still at work," he cried. "If we were not so late we'd
go in and have a word with him. Now there's a man who has solved