italics, and when he shook hands with anyone the recipient of the honor
felt it for the rest of the day. Abe watched Morris undergo the ordeal
and plunged his hands in his trousers' pockets.

"And this is Mr. Potash," Pasinsky cried, releasing his grip on Morris
and extending his hand toward Abe.

"How d'ye do?" Abe said without removing his hands. "I think I seen you
oncet before already in Mandleberger Brothers & Co., in Chicago."

"I presume you did," Marks Pasinsky replied. "Ed Mandleberger and me
married cousins. That is to say, my wife's mother's sister is a
sister-in-law to a brother of Ed Mandleberger's wife's mother."

"Huh, huh," Abe murmured. "Do you know Simon Kuhner, buyer for their
cloak department?"

Marks Pasinsky sat down and fixed Abe with an incredulous smile.

"A question!" he exclaimed. "Do I know him? Every afternoon, when I am
in Chicago, Simon and me drinks coffee together."

Abe and Morris looked at each other with glances of mixed wonder
and delight.

"I'll tell you another feller I'm intimate with, too," he said. "Do
you know Charles I. Fichter, cloak buyer for Gardner, Baum & Miller,
in Seattle?"

Abe nodded. He had been vainly trying to sell Fichter a bill of goods
since 1898.

"Well, Charlie and me was delegates to the National Grand Lodge of the
Independent Order Mattai Aaron, and I nominated Charlie for Grand
Scribe. The way it come about was this, if you'd care to hear about it."

"That's all right," Morris interrupted. "We take your word for it. The
point is, could you sell it him a big bill of goods, maybe?"

Marks Pasinsky leaned back in his chair and laughed uproariously.

"Why, Mr. Perlmutter," he said, all out of breath from his mirth, "that
feller is actually putting his job in danger because he's holding off in
his fall buying until I get to Seattle. Fichter wouldn't buy not a
dollar's worth of goods from nobody else but me, not if you was to make
him a present of them for nothing."

He gave many more instances of his friendship with cloak and suit
buyers. For example, it appeared that he knew Rudolph Rosenwater, buyer
for Feigenson & Schiffer, of San Francisco, to the extent of an anecdote
containing a long, intimate dialogue wherein Rosenwater commenced all
his speeches with: "Well, Markie."

"And so I says to him," Pasinsky concluded, "'Rudie, you are all right,'
I says, 'but you can't con me.'"

He looked from Abe to Morris and beamed with satisfaction. T