He sometimes had a way of implying,--by his manner, of course,--that he would rather not sell the treasure at all than to have it go into _your_ mansion, where it would be manifestly alone in its splendour, notwithstanding the priceless articles you had picked up elsewhere in previous efforts to inhabit the place with glory. On the other hand, if you happened to be nobody at all and therefore likely to resent being squelched, he could sell you a ten-dollar candlestick quite as amiably as the humblest clerk in the place. Indeed, he was quite capable of giving it to you for nine dollars if he found he had not quite correctly sized you up in the beginning. As he never erred in sizing up people of the Smith-Parvis ilk, however, his profits were sublime. Accident, and nothing less, brought him into contact with the common people looking for bargains: such as the faulty adjustment of his monocle, or a similarity in backs, or the perverseness of the telephone, or a sudden shower. Sudden showers always remind pedestrians without umbrellas that they've been meaning for a long time to stop in and price things, and they clutter up the place so. Mrs. Smith-Parvis was bent on discovering something cheap and unusual for the twins, whose joint birthday anniversary was but two days off. It occurred to her that it would be wise to give them another heirloom apiece. Something English, of course, in view of the fact that her husband's forebears had come over from England with the twenty or thirty thousand voyagers who stuffed the _Mayflower_ from stem to stern on her historic maiden trip across the Atlantic. Secretly, she had never got over being annoyed with the twins for having come regardless, so to speak. She had prayed for another boy like Stuyvesant, and along came the twins--no doubt as a sort of sop in the form of good measure. If there had to be twins, why under heaven couldn't she have been blessed with them on Stuyvesant's natal day? She couldn't have had too many Stuyvesants. Still, she considered it her duty to be as nice as possible to the twins, now that she had them; and besides, they were growing up to be surprisingly pretty girls, with a pleasantly increasing resemblance to Stuyvesant.