How difficult it is to think of great lives in terms of the small mosaics that go to make up the pattern of every man's day-by-day--the too tepid shaving-water; the badly laundered shirt-front; the three-minute egg; the too-short fourth leg of the table; the draught on the neck; the bad pen; the neighboring rooster; the misplaced key; the slipping chest-protector. Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could kill his Johnson's morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils. Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones! To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and carried probably more than his share of this world's responsibilities, there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing of checks and the six-o'clock making of cash, than that matinal instant, just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake, and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in the drawing. There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth, the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract leaping in glory into porcelain. Take the particular morning which ushers in our story, although it might have been any of twelve times three hundred others. "Sammy!" This upon opening his door, then crossing to close the conservative five inches of open window and over to the bedside for the kissing him awake. "Sammy, get up!" The snuggle away into the crotch of his elbow. "Sammy! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up! Sammy, a quarter to seven! You want to be late? I can't get him up!" "M-m-m-m-m-m!" "You want your own clerks to beat you to business so they can say they got a lazy boss?" "I'm awake, ma." Reaching up to stroke her hair, thin and gray now, and drawn back into an early-morning knob. "Don't splash in the bath-room so this morning, Sammy; it's a shame for the wall-paper." "I won't"--drawing the cord of his robe about his waist, and as if they did not both of them know just how faithfully disregarded would be that daily admonition. Then Mrs. Lipkind flung back the snowy sheets and bed-coverings, baring the striped ticking of the mattress. "Hurry, Sammy! I'm up so long I'm ready for my second cup of coffee." "Two minutes." And off across the hall, whistling, towel across arm.