hen you find a man so ungrateful that he
cannot be fitted out with somethings from my stock, I really suppose you
could not fit that man out in Paradise."

Mr. Isaacs was looking nervous. But it was not by the images which
his ordinary stock in trade would naturally cause to arise that he
was disturbed,--images though they were of folly, improvidence, and
distress. There was indeed hardly an article in the shop, except the new
plated jewelry in the window, that was not suggestive of misery or
of sin. But in Mr. Isaacs's well-poised mind no morbid fancies arose.
"Those hard winters makes me cheerful," he was wont to say in the fall;
"they makes the business lifely."

Still, Mr. Isaacs was a little troubled this afternoon, and, singularly
enough, about a most happy purchase that he had just made, at ninety per
cent below value. There the articles lay upon the counter,--a silk hat,
a long surtout, a gold-headed cane and a pair of large rubbers; a young
man's Derby hat and overcoat and rattan cane, and a pair of arctics;
a lady's bonnet and dolman and arctics; a young girl's hat with a soft
bird's-breast, and her seal-skin sack and arctics; besides four small
boys' hats and coats and arctics. It seemed as if some modern Elijah, a
family man, expectant of translation, had made with thrifty forethought
an "arrangement" that Mr. Isaacs's shop should be the point of
departure, and flying off in joyous haste, with wife and children, had
left the general raiment on the counter. You would naturally have looked
for a sky-lit hole in the ceiling.

"So help me gracious!" said Mr. Isaacs, turning the articles over; "I
suppose there 's some policemen just so wicked and soospicious to say I
must know those garments are stolen--scooped off some hat-tree, the last
winter, at one grab."

"Why do you enter dose on de book to-gedder?" said Mrs. Isaacs. "If
you put dose separate on de book, how de policeman know dey came in
togedder?"

"That is a great danger, Sarah. That's just the way they fix our good
friend Greenbaum. When they caught the thief, and he tell them where he
sell some things, and Greenbaum had put down those earrings and those
bracelets and that Balmoral skirt for three different times, they say he
must know those things was stolen,--if not, why did he put those things
down different from each other?

"But so help me gracious!" he added, presently, "I have not the least
soospicions, like the babes unborn, those goods a