was an official to whom I owed my
position. You say they are tainted now. If you only knew--but
I won't say any more. Thank you with all my heart, sir--thank
you--thank you."

Where do you suppose that woman carried me almost at a run? To a
bakery. Away from Old Jack and a sizzling good time to a bakery.
And I get changed, and she does a Sheridan-twenty-miles-away with
a dozen rolls and a section of jelly cake as big as a turbine
water-wheel. Of course I lost sight of her then, for I was snowed
up in the bakery, wondering whether I'd get changed at the drug
store the next day in an alum deal or paid over to the cement
works.

A week afterward I butted up against one of the one-dollar bills the
baker had given the woman for change.

"Hallo, E35039669," says I, "weren't you in the change for me in a
bakery last Saturday night?"

"Yep," says the solitaire in his free and easy style.

"How did the deal turn out?" I asked.

"She blew E17051431 for mills and round steak," says the one-spot.
"She kept me till the rent man came. It was a bum room with a sick
kid in it. But you ought to have seen him go for the bread and
tincture of formaldehyde. Half-starved, I guess. Then she prayed
some. Don't get stuck up, tenner. We one-spots hear ten prayers,
where you hear one. She said something about 'who giveth to the
poor.' Oh, let's cut out the slum talk. I'm certainly tired of the
company that keeps me. I wish I was big enough to move in society
with you tainted bills."

"Shut up," says I; "there's no such thing. I know the rest of it.
There's a 'lendeth to the Lord' somewhere in it. Now look on my back
and read what you see there."

"This note is a legal tender at its face value for all debts public
and private."

"This talk about tainted money makes me tired," says I.

ELSIE IN NEW YORK

No, bumptious reader, this story is not a continuation of the Elsie
series. But if your Elsie had lived over here in our big city there
might have been a chapter in her books not very different from this.

Especially for the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan
beset "with pitfall and with gin." But the civic guardians of the
young have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked,
and most of the dangerous paths are patrolled by their agents, who
seek to turn straying ones away from the peril that menaces them.
And this will tell you how they guided my Elsie safely through all
peril to the goal t