Women kept askin’ for Fashion’s Pansy, till you’d ’a’ thought every last one of ’em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all at once none of ’em wanted it--wouldn’t touch it. That and butter begun it. You know how a country merchant’s got to take all the butter the women bring him, and he’s got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for grease half the time. You can tell a woman she’d better keep an eye on her daughter, but if you say she don’t make good butter, that’s the last of that woman’s custom. But what’s finally knocked me out is this drop in bric-à-brac. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess I could have pulled through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so long, that I loaded up all I could with ’em last time I was in New York, and now nobody wants ’em; couldn’t give ’em away. Well, it’s all a game, and you don’t know any more how it’s comin’ out--you can’t bet on it with any more certainty--than you can on a trottin’ match. My! I wish I was dead.” The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man again retorted: “What say? Oh, it’s all well enough to preach; and I’ve heard about the law of demand and supply before. There’s about as much of a law to it as there is to three-card monte. If it wasn’t for my poor wife, I’d let ’em take me back on ice. I would that.” The deep-voiced man now seemed to have risen; there was a shuffling of feet, and presently a parley at the open door about commonplace matters; and then the two men exchanged adieux, and the door shut again, and all was silent in the room opposite Ray’s. He felt sorry for the unhappy man shut in there; but he perceived no special significance in what he had overheard. He had no great curiosity about the matter; it was one of those things that happened every day, and for tragedy was in no wise comparable to a disappointment in first love, such as he had carefully studied for his novel from his own dark experience. Still it did suggest something to Ray; it suggested a picturesque opening for his first New York letter for the Midland _Echo_, and he used it in illustration of the immensity of New York, and the strange associations and juxtapositions of life there. He treated the impending failure of the country storekeeper from an overstock of Japanese goods rather humorously: it was not like a real trouble, a trouble of the heart; and the cause seemed to him rather grotesquely disproportionate to the effect. In describing the incident as something he had overheard in a hotel, he threw in some touches that were intended to give the notion of a greater splendor than belonged to the place. He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair mattress. V.