another long night's vigil quite as a
matter of course.

While the supper was being eaten Sebastian offered a suggestion,
and his larger experience in social and commercial matters made his
proposition worth considering. Though only a car-builder's apprentice,
without any education except such as pertained to Lutheran doctrine,
to which he objected very strongly, he was imbued with American color
and energy. His transformed name of Bass suited him exactly. Tall,
athletic, and well-featured for his age, he was a typical stripling of
the town. Already he had formulated a philosophy of life. To succeed
one must do something--one must associate, or at least seem to
associate, with those who were foremost in the world of
appearances.

For this reason the young boy loved to hang about the Columbus
House. It seemed to him that this hotel was the center and
circumference of all that was worth while in the social sense. He
would go down-town evenings, when he first secured money enough to buy
a decent suit of clothes, and stand around the hotel entrance with his
friends, kicking his heels, smoking a two-for-five-cent cigar,
preening himself on his stylish appearance, and looking after the
girls. Others were there with him--town dandies and nobodies,
young men who came there to get shaved or to drink a glass of whisky.
And all of these he admired and sought to emulate. Clothes were the
main touchstone. If men wore nice clothes and had rings and pins,
whatever they did seemed appropriate. He wanted to be like them and to
act like them, and so his experience of the more pointless forms of
life rapidly broadened.

"Why don't you get some of those hotel fellows to give you their
laundry?" he asked of Jennie after she had related the afternoon's
experiences. "It would be better than scrubbing the stairs."

"How do you get it?" she replied.

"Why, ask the clerk, of course."

This plan struck Jennie as very much worth while.

"Don't you ever speak to me if you meet me around there," he
cautioned her a little later, privately. "Don't you let on that you
know me."

"Why?" she asked, innocently.

"Well, you know why," he answered, having indicated before that
when they looked so poor he did not want to be disgraced by having to
own them as relatives. "Just you go on by. Do you hear?"

"All right," she returned, meekly, for although this youth was not
much over a year her senior, his superior will dominated.

The next day on