ling _en route_ or _en
passant_, as our dear professor of modern languages used to try to get
us to remark. Say, between us old college friends, I cleared up a couple
of thousand last week just too easy for any use. You know Singerly, the
popular undertaker,--Egyptian secret of embalming, lady and gentleman
attendants, night and day,--always wears a spray of immortelles in his
lapel and a dash of tuberose essence on his handkerchief. Well, Singerly
and I operated together in the smoothest way you ever saw. Excuse me!"
He lay back and howled. "Well, there was an old house up here on High
Street just where it begins to get good; very exclusive--old families
and all that. It belonged to an estate, and I got an option on it just
for fun. I began taking Singerly up there to look at it. We'd measure
it, and step it off, and stop and palaver on the sidewalk. In a day or
two those people up there began to take notice and to do me the honor to
call on me. You see, my boy, an undertaking shop--even a fashionable
one--for a neighbor, isn't pleasant; it wouldn't add, as one might say,
to the _sauce piquante_ of life; and as a reminder of our mortality--a
trifle depressing, as you will admit."

He took the cigar from his mouth and examined the burning end of it
thoughtfully.

"I sold the option to one of Singerly's prospective neighbors for the
matter of eleven hundred. He's a retired wholesale grocer and didn't
need the money."

"Seems to me you're cutting pretty near the dead-line, Jack. That's not
a pretty sort of hold-up. You might as well take a sandbag and lie in
wait by night."

"Great rhubarb! You make me tired. I'm not robbing the widow and the
orphan, but a fat old Dutchman who doesn't ask anything of life but his
sauerkraut and beer."

"And you do! You'd better give your ethical sense a good tonic before
you butt into the penal code."

"Come off! I've got a better scheme even than the Singerly deal. The
school board's trying to locate a few schools in up-town districts. Very
undesirable neighbors. I rather think I can make a couple of turns
there. This is all strictly _inter nos_, as Professor Morton used to say
in giving me, as a special mark of esteem, a couple of hundred extra
lines of Virgil to keep me in o' nights."

He looked at his watch and gave the stem-key a few turns before
returning it to his pocket.

"You'll have to excuse me, old man. I've got a date with Adams, over at
the Central States Trust Co