One memorable day there came the familiar snick of an inserted cent and the rasp of the lever, and her box dropped out and went into the pocket of a young man who had bought it to light cigarettes. There was wild excitement and no little speculation among the matches. They were like troops on the very verge of an action. The young man gave them plenty of action. He used the first thirteen matches very quickly, which made a good deal more room in the box, and then there was a long undisturbed period while the box remained in the pocket of an old vest which hung on a hook in the closet of the young man’s boarding-house bedroom. One day, the young man having moved away and carelessly left the old vest behind him, the box was taken out by the boarding-house keeper’s husband, a mild-mannered gentleman who smoked a pipe outdoors, and he used nine more of the matches. Between the unconscious selection of the normal matches by the owners of the box and the jostling which the thin match had received from the others, she found herself tucked away into a narrow corner where the thin wood of the box-bottom was edged by the still thinner paper pasted outside. One day a companion of the boarding-house woman’s husband asked him for a light, and, forgetting to return the box, this man became its new owner. He used only one match, though, and then left the box on top of one of his front gate-posts, where he had been talking to a neighbor, and little Sallie Eaton saw it there and picked it off on her way home from school. Sallie tucked it away in the pocket of her apron, where her mother found it when the apron was going to the wash, and Lance Eaton, Sallie’s brother, found it on the sewing machine where his mother had laid it, and annexed it for himself. * * * * * There were thirty-seven matches in the box when Lance found it. There may have been some slight variation in the “average contents” when the box left the Emerald Match Company. It is certain that when Lance handed it through the car window in the railroad station to Big Pete Jenkins, there were only nine left and among these, quite tightly wedged by now into her corner, and out of sight, was the thin match. The other eight were dead-set against her by now. They had no further contact with her; she was ostracized, a pariah of a match--too thin, and too brown on one side, and with a head too little symmetrical and too little apt to light at the first draw along the box-side for any self-respecting match to notice her at all!