wed. "You should put on your hat and coat and come
with me."

* * * * *

It was during the third month of Philip Pinsky's employment with
Greenberg & Sen that Blaukopf, the druggist, insisted on a new coat of
white paint for the interior of his up-to-date store at the northwest
corner of Madison Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-second Street. His
landlord demurred at first, but finally, in the middle of June, a
painter's wagon stopped in front of the store and Harris Shein, painter
and decorator, alighted with two assistants. They conveyed into the
store pots of white lead and cans of turpentine, gasoline, and other
inflammable liquids used in the removal and mixing of paints. Harris
Shein was smoking a paper cigarette, and one of the assistants,
profiting by his employer's example, pulled a corncob pipe from his
pocket. Then, after he had packed the tobacco down firmly with his
finger, he drew a match across the seat of his trousers and forthwith
he began a three months' period of enforced abstinence from
house-painting and decorating. Simultaneously Blaukopf's plate-glass
show-window fell into the street, the horse ran away with the painter's
wagon, a policeman turned in a fire alarm, three thousand children came
on the run from a radius of ten blocks, and Mr. Blaukopf's stock in
trade punctuated the cremation of his fixtures with loud explosions at
uncertain intervals. In less than half an hour the entire building was
gutted, and when the firemen withdrew their apparatus Mr. Blaukopf
searched in vain for his prescription books. They had resolved
themselves into their original elements, and the number on the label of
the bottle which Aaron carried around in his breast-pocket provided no
clew to the ingredients of the medicine thus contained.

"That's a fine note," Aaron declared to Philip, as they surveyed the
black ruins the next morning. "Now what would I do? Without that
medicine I will cough my face off already."

He examined the label of the bottle and sighed.

"I suppose I could go and see that Doctor Goldenreich," he said, "and
right away I am out ten dollars."

"Why don't you ring up Miss Meyerson over at Zaretsky & Fatkin's?"
Philip suggested.

Aaron sighed heavily. His business relations with Greenberg & Sen had
proved far from satisfactory, and it was only Philip's job and his own
sense of shame that prevented him from resuming his dealings with
Zaretsky &