And this question set Jones running, and he answered: "That question is easily answered. I'll illustrate it. You know Filkins & Beaver, of Buffalo? No? I have always known 'em--ever since I have been in the business. I have sold 'em many a thousand bushel of wheat since I have been in Milwaukee, and many a thousand barrel of flour for 'em when I was in Toronto. Ef there is anything about wheat and flour that they don't know, you just want to go and tell 'em, you do, and they are the whitest men in the business. They have been longer in it than any two men livin'. They have the immense Eagle mill in Buffalo, and the Excelsior in Lockport, down on the second dock, the best water-power in Lockport, and that's saying a good deal, for the fall there is immense--it is the water-power that has made Lockport. Take that away and there wouldn't be anything of that city at all, and the people there are enterprising enough to use it, they are. Filkins & Beaver, take all their mills together, must flour one hundred thousand bushels of wheat a day, and that's no small business, and don't you forget it. It takes good heads to run such a business, y' bet yer. They know me mighty well, I tell ye, for I have done business with 'em for nigh onto thirty years, and every time I go to Buffalo, and I have to go there once a month, I have to stop with either one or the other of 'em. They wouldn't any more let me go to a hotel than they'd let me sleep on the street. "Both of 'em came from the same village in England and both went back and married the girls they were engaged to afore they left, and then brought 'em to Buffalo, and settled down to work. They worked themselves, they did, y' bet yer. First they bought the little Eagle mill, that hadn't only two run of stone, and they did the whole work with their own hands, they made a great deal of money for they were close operators, and kept the run of the markets, and they enlarged the Eagle till it kivered all the ground they had, and then they built the Continental, and that was too small for 'em, and then they went to Lockport and bought a water-power there, and built the Excelsior, and another one at Wellsville, and I don't know where all." In glided the Young Man who Knows Everything, as chirpy as possible, and he broke into Jones' narration without as much as saying "by your leave." "Jones, there's no use in trying it. You can't cover up bad actions with loud professions. You can't smother the scent of a skunk by singing 'Old Hundred.'" "What in blazes has bad actions and skunks to do with--" He might as well have talked to an Atlantic gale. The young man ambled off serenely and attacked another party with the same cheerfulness with which he assailed Jones, who resumed his narrative: