"'Never better. It ain't that. He has things on his mind. You see--'

"I cal'late he'd have told us the yarn, only Sim wouldn't wait to hear
it. We was goin' sight-seein' and we had 'aquarium' and 'Stock Exchange'
on the list for that afternoon. The hotel clerk had made out a kind of
schedule for us of things we'd ought to see while we was in New York,
and so fur we'd took in the zoological menagerie and the picture museum,
and Central Park and Brooklyn Bridge.

"On the way downtown in the elevated railroad Sim done some preachin'.
His text was took from the Golconda House sign, which had 'T. Dempsey,
Proprietor,' painted on it.

"'It's that Dempsey man's conscience that makes him so blue, Hiram,'
says Sim. 'It's the way he makes his money. He sells liquor.'

"'Oh!' says I. 'Is THAT it? I thought maybe he'd been sleepin' on one
of his own hotel beds. THEY'RE enough to make any man blue--black and
blue.'

"The 'aquarium' wa'n't a success. Phinney was disgusted. He give one
look around, grabbed me by the arm, and marched me out of that building
same as Deacon Titcomb, of the Holiness Church at Denboro, marched his
boy out of the Universalist sociable.

"'It's nothin' but a whole passel of fish,' he snorts. 'The idea of
sendin' two Cape Codders a couple of miles to look at FISH. I've looked
at 'em and fished for 'em, and et 'em all the days of my life,' he says,
'and when I'm on a vacation I want a change. I'd forgot that "aquarium"
meant fish, or you wouldn't have got me within smellin' distance of
it. Necessity's one thing and pleasure's another, as the boy said about
takin' his ma's spring bitters.'

"So we headed for the Stock Exchange. We got our gallery tickets at the
bank where the Golconda folks kept money, and in a little while we was
leanin' over a kind of marble bulwarks and starin' down at a gang of men
smokin' and foolin' and carryin' on. 'Twas a dull day, so we found out
afterward, and I guess likely that was true. Anyway, I never see such
grown-up men act so much like children. There was a lot of poles stuck
up around with signs on 'em, and around every pole was a circle of
bedlamites hollerin' like loons. Hollerin' was the nighest to work
of anything I see them fellers do, unless 'twas tearin' up papers and
shovin' the pieces down somebody's neck or throwin' 'em in the air like
a play-actin' snowstorm.

"'What's the matter with 'em?' says I. 'High finance taken away their
brains?'

"But Phinney w