"’Let her go,’ says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more. With that—now listen to what I’m telling—with that the old gent goes down on his knees in the mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with excitement while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard. Before he had raised it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes there a second and takes out something—something shut in the palm of his hand. "’That’s all,’ says he: ’Thank you, my man,’ and gives us a quid apiece. We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the horribleness of the thing. "’That’s all,’ he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud. ’That’s all, thank Gawd.’ Then to the Cape boy: ’Drive her home, Jim.’ Five minutes later we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill." "But what was it he took out of the baby’s coffin?" said half a dozen men in a breath at this point. "What was it? What could it have been?" "Ah, what was it?" said Miller. "I’ll be damned if I know what it was. I never knew, I never will know." _*A Reversion to Type*_ Schuster was too damned cheeky. He was the floor-walker in a department store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with—let us say my cousin. A floor-walker should let his communications be "first aisle left," or "elevator, second floor front," or "third counter right," for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. But Schuster used to come up to—my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not loud but deep. However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself. Paul Schuster is the hero—Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now! He was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain. When on duty he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and blue-grey "pants" that cost four dollars. Besides this he parted his hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement. His father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop. Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.