your joints I shouldn't want
anything that anybody could do for me. Can't you walk, hop, skip, jump,
all you want to?"

This was so manifestly unfair that I retorted stubbornly, "But I don't
want to."

He glanced down on me with a flicker of his still charming smile.

"Well, you would if you were president of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic and had looked into the evening paper," he said.

"Are you president of it still, sir?"

"Eh? eh? You'll be wanting to push me out of my job next, I suppose?"

"I'd like to have it when you are dead, sir," I replied.

But this instead of gratifying the General appeared plainly to annoy
him. "There now, you'd better run along and sell your papers," he
remarked irritably. "If I give you a dime, will you quit bothering me?"

"I'd rather you'd give me a start, sir, as you promised."

"Good Lord! There you are again! Do you know the meaning of
n-u-i-s-a-n-c-e, boy?"

"No, sir."

"Well, ask your teacher the next time you go to school."

"I don't go to school. I work."

"You work, eh? Well, look here, let's see. What do you want of me?"

"I thought you might tell me how to begin. I don't want to stay common."

For a moment his attention seemed fixed on a gold pencil which he had
taken from his waistcoat pocket. Then opening his card-case he scribbled
a line on a card and handed it to me. "If you choose you may take that
to Bob Brackett at the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, on Twenty-fifth
Street, near the river," he said, not unkindly. "If he happens to want a
boy, he may give you a job; but remember, I don't promise you that he
will want one,--and if he does, it isn't likely he'd make you president
on the spot," he concluded, with a chuckle.

Waving a gesture of dismissal he started off at a hobble; then catching
the eye of a lady in a passing carriage, he straightened himself, bowed
with a gallant flourish of his wide-brimmed hat, and went on with a look
of agony but a jaunty pace. As I turned, a minute later, to discover who
could have wrought this startling change in the behaviour of the
General, an open surrey, the bottom filled with a pink cloud of wild
azaleas, stopped at the curbing before the grey house, and the faces of
Miss Mitty and Sally shone upon me over the blossoms. The child was
coloured like a flower from the sun and wind, and there was a soft dewy
look about her flushed cheeks, and her very full red lips. At the corner
of her mouth, near her square l