For nine months or so it would
manufacture buttons out of bone. Then it would suddenly produce brass
buttons for coachmen's liveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed
tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman, with
his weak and fluttering heart, didn't want his factory to manufacture
anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was
seventy. But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town
point after him and exclaim: "There goes the laziest man in Waterbury!"
that he tried taking a tour round the world. And Florence and a young
man called Jimmy went with him. It appears from what Florence told me
that Jimmy's function with Mr Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for
him. He had to keep him, for instance, out of political discussions. For
the poor old man was a violent Democrat in days when you might travel
the world over without finding anything but a Republican. Anyhow, they
went round the world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what
the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that you should
know what the old gentleman was; he had a great deal of influence in
forming the character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old Mr
Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little presents to
people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the things to
take for that purpose were oranges--because California is the orange
country--and comfortable folding chairs. So he bought I don't know
how many cases of oranges--the great cool California oranges, and
half-a-dozen folding chairs in a special case that he always kept in his
cabin. There must have been half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they
employed--to every person with whom he had so much as a nodding
acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning. And they lasted him right
round the girdle of this mighty globe of ours. When they were at North
Cape, even, he saw on the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a
lighthouse. "Hello," says he to himself, "these fellows must be very
lonely. Let's take them some oranges." So he had a boatload of his fruit
out and had himself rowed to the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding
chairs he lent to any lady that he came across and liked or who seemed
tired and invalidish on the ship. And so, guarded against his heart an