to
supervise--wherein lay one of the chief sources of his value.

"Jimmy, bring me the _Journal of Commerce_," he said to the invaluable
and ubiquitous one.

"Mr. O'Connor's got it on his desk, sir," replied that youth, almost
breathlessly. Speed in action had so demanded equivalent celerity in
diction that often speech came badly second in endurance, causing him
to sputter and gasp for completed utterance.

"Well, go and see if he isn't through with it," Smith directed. "I
haven't seen the losses yet this morning."

Almost immediately, a modern Manhattan Mercury, Jimmy was again at his
side.

"No, sir--he says he's still usin' it," he reported.

"Bring it to me when he's finished," Smith closed the matter, devoting
himself to other things. Those requiring his attention were numerous
enough, but first of all came an interruption in the shape of a caller.

All manner of men come into the agency department of an insurance
company. Smith's field covered the whole Atlantic Coast and Gulf
sections of the country, and the agents from these states alone made
quite an army, and any one of these agents was likely at any time to
appear from a bland blue sky, completely upsetting the General Agent's
continuity of work. Then there were the placers from the brokerage
firms, offering out-of-town risks which most of them had personally
never seen and knew little or nothing about, and whose descriptive
powers were all the greater for being unhampered by any blunt facts, a
few of which are so often fatal to a successful rhetorical ascension.
Then there were the various clients of the company who came straggling
in to have a New York City policy transferred to cover for six days at
Old Point Comfort, or to ask whether the presence of a Japanese
heater--size two by three and one half inches--would destroy the
validity of their policy; and there was the lady whose false teeth fell
into the kitchen stove while she was putting on a scuttle of coal, and
who thought the company should reimburse her for the loss under her
policy which covered all her personal effects and wearing apparel; and
then there was the suspicious individual who called to make sure that
his premium had been properly transmitted to the company, for the local
agent in his town has strange ways and looked very peculiar when
accepting the money.

These and a hundred others, all in the way of business; and in addition
there were the shifting atoms of humanity w