ven shut his knife.

He slightly stared. Richling, in a low, private tone, was asking him for
employment.

"What?" turning his ear up and frowning downward.

The application was repeated, the first words with a slightly resentful
ring, but the rest more quietly.

The store-keeper stared again, and shook his head slowly.

"No, sir," he said, in a barely audible tone. Richling moved on, not
stopping at the next place, or the next, or the next; for he felt the
man's stare all over his back until he turned the corner and found
himself in Tchoupitoulas street. Nor did he stop at the first place
around the corner. It smelt of deteriorating potatoes and up-river
cabbages, and there were open barrels of onions set ornamentally aslant
at the entrance. He had a fatal conviction that his services would not
be wanted in malodorous places.

"Now, isn't that a shame?" asked the chair-whittler, as Richling passed
out of sight. "Such a gentleman as that, to be beggin' for work from
door to door!"

"He's not beggin' f'om do' to do'," said a second, with a Creole accent
on his tongue, and a match stuck behind his ear like a pen. "Beside,
he's too _much_ of a gennlemun."

"That's where you and him differs," said the first. He frowned upon the
victim of his delicate repartee with make-believe defiance. Number Two
drew from an outside coat-pocket a wad of common brown wrapping-paper,
tore from it a small, neat parallelogram, dove into an opposite pocket
for some loose smoking-tobacco, laid a pinch of it in the paper, and,
with a single dexterous turn of the fingers, thumbs above, the rest
beneath,--it looks simple, but 'tis an amazing art,--made a cigarette.
Then he took down his match, struck it under his short coat-skirt,
lighted his cigarette, drew an inhalation through it that consumed a
third of its length, and sat there, with his eyes half-closed, and all
that smoke somewhere inside of him.

"That young man," remarked a third, wiping a toothpick on his thigh and
putting it in his vest-pocket, as he stepped to the front, "don't know
how to _look_ fur work. There's one way fur a day-laborer to look fur
work, and there's another way fur a gentleman to look fur work, and
there's another way fur a--a--a man with money to look fur somethin'
to put his money into. _It's just like fishing!_" He threw both hands
outward and downward, and made way for a porter's truck with a load of
green meat. The smoke began to fall from Number Two