“You forgot it, ye know—when ye bought them nails,” he said hurriedly; then added, “why don’t ye come in and set down?” For a second Joe hesitated; then he raised his head with a peculiarly defiant up-tilting of his chin, and strolled across the room to an unoccupied cracker-barrel behind the gesticulating miners. Pedler Jim went back to his customer. “You won’t find a better smoke within fifty miles!” he said pompously, giving the box of cigars on the counter a suggestive push. The well-dressed man gave a disagreeable laugh. “Well, that’s hardly saying very much, is it?” he questioned. At the stranger’s first words Hustler Joe glanced up sharply. His fingers twitched and a gray look crept around the corners of his mouth. The room, the miners, and Pedler Jim seemed to fade and change like the dissolving pictures he used to see when a boy. A New England village street drifted across his vision with this well-dressed stranger in the foreground. He could even see a yellow-lettered sign out one of the windows: GEORGE L. MARTIN, _Counselor at Law_. Then it all faded into nothingness again—all save the well-dressed stranger in the tall black hat. In another minute the jabbering miners, Bill Somers, and the obsequious hunchback were in their old places, and Pedler Jim was saying: “Jest try ’em, an’ see fur yerself.” “All right, I’ll take you at your word,” laughed the stranger, picking out a cigar and leisurely striking a match. “It’s a pity you can’t have a few more languages going in here,” he added, throwing the dead match on the floor and glancing at the group around the stove. “I suppose Barrington employs mostly foreigners in the mines, eh?” The hunchback thrust his brown fingers through his hair and made a wry face. “Foreigners!” he exclaimed. “I was born and raised in the state of Maine, an’ if it wa’n’t fur Bill Somers—he’s from York State—to talk God’s own language to me once in awhile, I’d ’a’ gone daft long ago!” The stranger chuckled softly. “You hav’n’t anyone here at the works from New England, then, I take it, eh?” he asked, with studied carelessness. A smile crept up from Pedler Jim’s mouth and looked out of his twinkling eyes. “Well, we have—” he began, then his eyes suddenly lost their twinkle as they encountered the despairing appeal from beneath Hustler Joe’s slouch hat. “We have—been wishin’ there would be some,” he finished after the slightest of hesitations. “We’ve got everythin’ else under the sun!” Bill Somers’s long legs came down from the counter abruptly. “Why, Jim, there’s Hustler Joe—ain’t he from New England?” The hunchback’s little beany eyes turned upon Somers and looked him through and through without winking. “Hustler Joe came over the mountains from San Francisco, I have heard,” he said blandly. “Oh, so he did—so he did!” murmured Somers, and sauntered out the door.