“Where I got the energy to care as much about it as I did is more than I can understand. I was sick and hot and weak as a kitten, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything except find or replace that penny, and immediately I began casting about for a way to do it. I looked into a couple of stores, hoping I’d see some one I knew, but while there were a few fellows loafing in front, just as you saw them today, there wasn’t one that I felt like going up to and saying: ‘Here! You got a penny?’ I thought of a couple of offices where I could have gotten it without much trouble, but they were some distance off, and besides being pretty dizzy, I hated to go out of my route when I was carrying bank money, because it looked kind of strange. “So what should I do but commence walking back along the street toward the Union Depot where I last remembered having the penny. It was a brand new penny, and I thought maybe I’d see it shining where it dropped. So I kept walking, looking pretty carefully at the sidewalk and thinking what I’d better do. I laughed a little, because I felt sort of silly for worrying about a penny, but I didn’t enjoy laughing, and it really didn’t seem silly to me at all. “Well, by and by I got back to the Union Depot without having either seen the old penny or having thought what was the best way to get another. I hated to go all the way home, ’cause we lived a long distance out; but what else was I to do? So I found a piece of shade close to the depot, and stood there considering, thinking first one thing and then another, and not getting anywhere at all. One little penny, just _one_--something almost any man in sight would have given me; something even the nigger baggage-smashers were jingling around in their pockets.... I must have stood there about five minutes. I remember there was a line of about a dozen men in front of an army recruiting station they’d just opened, and a couple of them began to yell: ‘Join the Army!’ at me. That woke me up, and I moved on back toward the bank, getting worried now, getting mixed up and sicker and sicker and knowing a million ways to find a penny and not one that seemed convenient or right. I was exaggerating the importance of losing it, and I was exaggerating the difficulty of finding another, but you just have to believe that it seemed about as important to me just then as though it were a hundred dollars. “Then I saw a couple of men talking in front of Moody’s soda place, and recognized one of them--Mr. Burling--who’d been a friend of my father’s. That was relief, I can tell you. Before I knew it I was chattering to him so quick that he couldn’t follow what I was getting at. “‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know I’m a little deaf and can’t understand when you talk that fast! What is it you want, Henry? Tell me from the beginning.’