Five Hundred Dollars: First published in the "Century Magazine" — John Shaqi
Five Hundred Dollars: First published in the "Century Magazine"Chaplin, Heman White
General
Five Hundred Dollars: First published in the "Century Magazine"
Chaplin, Heman White
New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It would have been a grasping disposition that could not be suited with
something from out Mr. Isaacs's stock. It would have been hard to name
a faculty of the human soul or a member of the human body to which it
could not lend aid and comfort. One musically inclined could draw the
wailing bow or sway the accordion; pucker at the pensive flute, or beat
the martial, soul-arousing drum. One stripped, as it were, on his way
to Jericho, could slink in here and select for himself a fig-leaf from
a whole Eden of cut-away coats and wide-checkered trousers, all fitting
“to surprise yourself,” and could be quite sure of finding a pair of
boots, of whatever size was needed, of the very finest custom hand
work,--a misfit, made for a gentleman in New York. A devout man,
according to his leanings, could pray from the prayer-book of an
impoverished Episcopalian, or sing from the hymn-book of an insolvent
Baptist.
“So help me gracious!” Mr. Isaacs used to say, raising his shoulders
and opening wide his palms; “when you find a man so ungrateful that he
cannot be fitted out with somethings from my stock, I really suppose you
could not fit that man out in Paradise.”
Mr. Isaacs was looking nervous. But it was not by the images which
his ordinary stock in trade would naturally cause to arise that he
was disturbed,--images though they were of folly, improvidence, and
distress. There was indeed hardly an article in the shop, except the new
plated jewelry in the window, that was not suggestive of misery or
of sin. But in Mr. Isaacs's well-poised mind no morbid fancies arose.
“Those hard winters makes me cheerful,” he was wont to say in the fall;
“they makes the business lifely.”
Still, Mr. Isaacs was a little troubled this afternoon, and, singularly
enough, about a most happy purchase that he had just made, at ninety per
cent below value. There the articles lay upon the counter,--a silk hat,
a long surtout, a gold-headed cane and a pair of large rubbers; a young
man's Derby hat and overcoat and rattan cane, and a pair of arctics;
a lady's bonnet and dolman and arctics; a young girl's hat with a soft
bird's-breast, and her seal-skin sack and arctics; besides four small
boys' hats and coats and arctics. It seemed as if some modern Elijah, a
family man, expectant of translation, had made with thrifty forethought
an “arrangement” that Mr. Isaacs's shop should be the point of
departure, and flying off in joyous haste, with wife and children, had
left the general raiment on the counter. You would naturally have looked
for a sky-lit hole in the ceiling.
“So help me gracious!” said Mr. Isaacs, turning the articles over; “I
suppose there 's some policemen just so wicked and soospicious to say I
must know those garments are stolen--scooped off some hat-tree, the last
winter, at one grab.”
“Why do you enter dose on de book to-gedder?” said Mrs. Isaacs. “If
you put dose separate on de book, how de policeman know dey came in
togedder?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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