" with the smoke from his pipe as he waved
the match to extinguish it. "That's fine," he said. "The smoke I had
before dinner didn't taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if
I'd lost my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You
bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He's the biggest man that's ever
lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the
Governors and Senators or anything they've raised here, and put 'em in
a pot with him, and they won't come out one-two-three alongside o' him!
And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything
he's got on his mind--to think he'd never let anything prevent him from
coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then
walk right upstairs and kind of CALL on me, as it were well, it makes
me sort of feel as if I wasn't so much of a nobody, so to speak, as your
mother seems to like to make out sometimes."

"How foolish, papa! Of COURSE you're not 'a nobody.'"

Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to
be further stimulated by his daughter's applause. "I guess there aren't
a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that
much interest in 'em," he said. "Of course I don't set up to believe
it's all because of merit, or anything like that. He'd do the same for
anybody else that'd been with the company as long as I have, but still
it IS something to be with the company that long and have him show he
appreciates it."

"Yes, indeed, it is, papa."

"Yes, sir," Adams said, reflectively. "Yes, sir, I guess that's so. And
besides, it all goes to show the kind of a man he is. Simon pure, that's
what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There's never been anybody work
for him that didn't respect him more than they did any other man in the
world, I guess. And when you work for him you know he respects you,
too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute
confidence in you; and that's mighty stimulating: it makes you want to
show him he hasn't misplaced it. There's great big moral values to the
way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the
business: it ain't all just dollars and cents--not by any means!"

He was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to
this theme, and Alice was glad to see so much renewal of life in him; he
had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The