nd his financial condition was
such that he could not afford luxuries.

"I love them all," he said, "but I haven't money enough to entertain a
quarter of them. The last time Billie Hicks was up here he smoked
sixteen Invincible cigars. Now, I am very fond of Billie Hicks, but with
cigars at twenty cents apiece I can't afford him more than one Sunday in
a year. He's getting a little cold because I haven't asked him up
since."

"Why don't you buy cheaper cigars? At our grocery store they have some
very nice looking ones at two for five cents," suggested Mrs. Jarley.

"I don't wish to have to move out of the house," said Jarley.

Mrs. Jarley failed to see the connection.

"Very likely you don't," said Jarley; "but if I smoked one of your
two-and-a-half-cent grocery cigars in this house, you'd see the point in
a minute. If you will get me a yard of cotton cloth, and let me put it
in the furnace fire, you'll get a fair idea of the kind of atmosphere
we'd be breathing if I allowed a cigar like that to be lit within fifty
feet of the front door."

"But you can get a good cigar for ten cents, can't you?" Mrs. Jarley
asked.

"Yes--very good," assented Jarley; "but Billie would probably smoke
thirty-two of those, and carry three or four away with him in his
pockets. I'd lose even more that way. It's a singular thing about
friends. They have some conscience about Invincible cigars, but they'll
take others by the handful."

Jarley was also somewhat blue upon this occasion because none of his
inventions--the little things he thought out in his leisure moments, and
out of some of which he had hoped to gain a deal of profit--had been
successful. The public had refused to place any confidence whatsoever in
his patent reversible spats, which, when turned inside out, could be
made useful as galoches; and the beaux of New York actually rejected
with scorn the celluloid chrysanthemum, which he had hoped would become
a popular boutonniere because of its durability and cheapness. An
impecunious young man with care could make one fifteen-cent
chrysanthemum of the Jarley order last through a whole season, and it
could be colored to suit the wearer's taste with the ordinary
paint-boxes that children so delight in; but in spite of this the
celluloid chrysanthemum was a distinct failure, and Jarley had had his
trouble for his pains, to say nothing of the cost of the model. But
worst of all the failures, because of the prospective losses