nd of its
rightful owner.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment,
nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always
his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat
needs to be cleaned again.

Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty.
You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When
business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener
than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of
the sweatshops.

One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint my
headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and
dirt like a magnet.

"They say the Indians weave 'em under water," said I, for a leader.

"Don't you believe it," said Finch. "No Indian or white man could stay
under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to politics? I see
in the paper something about a law they've passed called 'the law of
supply and demand.'"

I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a
politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.

"I didn't know," said Finch. "I heard a good deal about it a year or so
ago, but in a one-sided way."

"Yes," said I, "political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they
never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail
fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side."

"I heard it from a king," said Finch--"the white king of a tribe of
Indians in South America."

I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother's knee
to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their
uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the door-step.
I know a piano player in a cheap cafe who has shot lions in Africa,
a bell-boy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an
express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's claw for
a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in
sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress
me.

"A new band?" asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.

"Yes," said I, "and half an inch wider." I had had a new band five days
before.

"I meets a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story--"a man
brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in
Schlagel's. That was two