p and said, 'Buy a ticket in the lottery; just a dollar.' Oh, I
remember it just as plain as though it was yesterday, and I wasn't going
to at first----"

"And don't you know I told Maria it was against the law?"

"Yes, I remember, and then I gave her a dollar and put the ticket in my
pocketbook. It's in my pocketbook now at home in the top drawer of my
bureau--oh, suppose it should be stolen now," she suddenly exclaimed.

"It's worth big money now," asserted Marcus.

"Five thousand dollars. Who would have thought it? It's wonderful."
Everybody started and turned. It was McTeague. He stood in the middle of
the floor, wagging his huge head. He seemed to have just realized what
had happened.

"Yes, sir, five thousand dollars!" exclaimed Marcus, with a sudden
unaccountable mirthlessness. "Five thousand dollars! Do you get on to
that? Cousin Trina and you will be rich people."

"At six per cent, that's twenty-five dollars a month," hazarded the
agent.

"Think of it. Think of it," muttered McTeague. He went aimlessly about
the room, his eyes wide, his enormous hands dangling.

"A cousin of mine won forty dollars once," observed Miss Baker. "But he
spent every cent of it buying more tickets, and never won anything."

Then the reminiscences began. Maria told about the butcher on the next
block who had won twenty dollars the last drawing. Mrs. Sieppe knew a
gasfitter in Oakland who had won several times; once a hundred dollars.
Little Miss Baker announced that she had always believed that lotteries
were wrong; but, just the same, five thousand was five thousand.

"It's all right when you win, ain't it, Miss Baker?" observed Marcus,
with a certain sarcasm. What was the matter with Marcus? At moments he
seemed singularly out of temper.

But the agent was full of stories. He told his experiences, the legends
and myths that had grown up around the history of the lottery; he told
of the poor newsboy with a dying mother to support who had drawn a prize
of fifteen thousand; of the man who was driven to suicide through want,
but who held (had he but known it) the number that two days after his
death drew the capital prize of thirty thousand dollars; of the little
milliner who for ten years had played the lottery without success, and
who had one day declared that she would buy but one more ticket and then
give up trying, and of how this last ticket had brought her a fortune
upon which she could retire; of tickets that had be