She tossed him a coin from the small saucerful of them on the table beside her. He caught it with the simian agility of his tiny hands. "Nice Teenie! Nice old Teenie!" A first group had strolled up, indolent and insolent at the spectacle of them. "Photographs! Photographs! Take the folks back home a signed photograph of Teenie--only ten cents, one dime. Give the kiddies a treat--signed photograph of little Teenie!" She would solicit thus, canorous of phrase, a fan of her cardboard likenesses held out, invitational. Occasionally there were sales, the coins rattling down into the china saucer beside her; oftener a mere bombardment of insolence and indolence, occasionally a question. This day from a motorman, loitering in uniform between runs, "Say, skinnay, whatcha weigh?" Whatever of living tissue may have shrunk and quivered deep beneath the surface of Miss Hoag was further insulated by a certain professional pride--that of the champion middleweight for his cauliflower ear, of the beauty for the tiny mole where her neck is whitest, the _ballerina_ for her double joints. "Wanna come up and dance with me and find out?" "O Lord!"--receding from the crowd and its trail of laughter. "O Lord! Excuse me. Good night!" A CHILD: Missus, is all of you just one lady? "Bless your heart, little pettie, they gimme a good measure, didn't they? Here's a chocolate drop for the little pettie." "Come away! Don't take nothing from her!" "I wouldn't hurt your little girl, lady. I wouldn't harm a pretty hair of her head; I love the kiddies." "Good-by, missus." "Good-by, little pettie." A MAN: Say, was you born in captivity--in this line o' work, I mean? "Law, no, friend! I never seen the light of the show business up to eight year ago. There wasn't a member of my family, all dead and put away now, weighed more 'n one-fifty. They say it of my mother, she was married at ninety pounds and died at a hundred and six." "You don't say so." "I was born and raised on a farm out in Ohio. Bet not far from your part of the country, from the looks of you, friend. Buckeye?" "Not a bad guess at that--Indiana's mine." "Law! to my way of thinking, there's no part of the Union got anything on the Middle States. Knock me around all you want, I always say, but let me be buried in the Buckeye State. Photographs? Signed photographs at ten cents each. Take one home to the wife, friend, out in Indiana. Come, friends, what's a dime? Ten cents!" The crowd, treacle-slow, and swinging its children shoulder-high, would shuffle on, pause next at the falsetto exhortations of the Baron, then on to the collapsibilities of the Boneless Wonder, the flexuosities of the Snake-charmer, the goose-fleshing, the terrible crunching of Jastrow the Granite Jaw. A commotion, this last, not unlike the steam-roller leveling of a rock road. Miss Hoag retired then back to her chair, readjusting the photographs to their table display, wielding her fan largely.