onions, and apples.

Sitting on the bench, he was thinking of this apparatus, when fifteen
dollars a week became a necessity. But the machine required more iron
than wood work, and he had not the means to do the former, and no
capital to invest in other people's labor. Then he turned his attention
to a new kind of boot-jack he had in his mind--an improvement on one he
had seen, which could be folded up and put in a traveller's carpet-bag.
As this implement was all wood except the hinges and screws, it looked
more hopeful. He could make half a dozen of them in a day, and they
would sell for half a dollar apiece. He was thinking of an improvement
on the improvement, when the stampede of the mice deranged his ideas;
but they gave him a new one.

White mice were beautiful little creatures. Their fur was so very
white, their eyes so very pink, and their paws so very cunning, that
everybody liked to see them. Even the magnificent Mr. Checkynshaw had
deigned to regard them with some attention, and had condescended to say
that his daughter Elinora would be delighted to see them. Then the
houses, and the gymnastic apparatus which Leo attached to them,
rendered them tenfold more interesting. At a store in Court Street the
enterprising young man had seen them sold for half a dollar a pair;
indeed, he had paid this sum for the ancestral couple from which had
descended, in the brief space of a year and a half the numerous tribes
and families that peopled the miniature palaces on the basement walls.

At this rate his present stock was worth seventy-five dollars--the
coveted salary of five whole weeks! In another month, at least fifty
more little downy pink-eyes would emerge from their nests, adding
twenty-five dollars more to his capital stock in trade!

Leo had already decided to go into the mouse business.

He was counting his chickens before they were hatched, and building
magnificent castles in the air; but even the most brilliant success, as
well as the most decided failure, is generally preceded by a vast
amount of ground and lofty tumbling in the imagination. If the man in
Court Street could sell a pair of white mice for fifty cents, and a
beggarly tin box with a whirligig for a dollar, making the
establishment and its occupants cost a dollar and a half, why would not
one of his splendid palaces, with two or three pairs of mice in it,
bring three, or even five dollars? That was the point, and there was
the argument all l