esterday I made but three sales."

"I told you they'd whoop things up when they got started," said the
consul.

"I think I shall order a dozen more cases of goods, to keep the stock
up," said Mr. Hemstetter, beaming through his spectacles.

"I wouldn't send in any orders yet," advised Johnny. "Wait till you
see how the trade holds up."

Each night Johnny and Keogh sowed the crop that grew dollars by day.
At the end of ten days two-thirds of the stock of shoes had been
sold; and the stock of cockleburrs was exhausted. Johnny cabled to
Pink Dawson for another 500 pounds, paying twenty cents per pound as
before. Mr. Hemstetter carefully made up an order for $1500 worth of
shoes from Northern firms. Johnny hung about the store until this
order was ready for the mail, and succeeded in destroying it before
it reached the postoffice.

That night he took Rosine under the mango tree by Goodwin's porch,
and confessed everything. She looked him in the eye, and said: "You
are a very wicked man. Father and I will go back home. You say it was
a joke? I think it is a very serious matter."

But at the end of half an hour's argument the conversation had
been turned upon a different subject. The two were considering the
respective merits of pale blue and pink wall paper with which the
old colonial mansion of the Atwoods in Dalesburg was to be decorated
after the wedding.

On the next morning Johnny confessed to Mr. Hemstetter. The shoe
merchant put on his spectacles, and said through them: "You strike me
as being a most extraordinary young scamp. If I had not managed this
enterprise with good business judgment my entire stock of goods might
have been a complete loss. Now, how do you propose to dispose of the
rest of it?"

When the second invoice of cockleburrs arrived Johnny loaded them and
the remainder of the shoes into a schooner, and sailed down the coast
to Alazan.

There, in the same dark and diabolical manner, he repeated his
success; and came back with a bag of money and not so much as a
shoestring.

And then he besought his great Uncle of the waving goatee and starred
vest to accept his resignation, for the lotus no longer lured him. He
hankered for the spinach and cress of Dalesburg.

The services of Mr. William Terence Keogh as acting consul, _pro
tem._, were suggested and accepted, and Johnny sailed with the
Hemstetters back to his native shores.

Keogh slipped into the sinecure of the American consulship wit