"With Letitia," he says, noddin’. "I haven’t got an order, but I have got a promise. She’s agreed to drop in one of these days and look us over."

"Well!" says I, "I should say that _was_ a corner stone."

"We’ll hope ’tis," he says. "Ho, ho! Skipper, I wish you might have been present at the exercises. They were funny."

Seems he’d managed—bribery and corruption of the hired help again—to see Letitia alone in what she called her "mornin’ room." He said that, if he’d paid any attention to the temperature of that room when he and she first met in it, he’d have figgered he’d struck the morgue; but he warmed it up a little afore he left. Miss Pendlebury just set and glared frosty while he talked and talked and talked. She said about three words to his two hundred thousand, but every one of hers was a "no." She didn’t care to patronize the local merchants. The city ones were bad enough—she had all the trouble she wanted with _them_. She was not interested; and would he please be careful when he went out and not step on the flower beds.

He was about ready to give it up when he happened to notice an ili portrait in a gorgeous gold frame hangin’ on the wall. ’Twas the picture of a man, and Jim Henry said there was a kind of great-I-am look to it, a combination of fatness and importance and wisdom, same as you see in a stuffed owl, that give him an idea. He started to go, stopped in front of the picture and began to look it over, admirin’ but reverent, same as a garter snake might look at a boa-constrictor, as proof of what the race was capable of.

"Excuse me, Miss Pendlebury," he says, "but that is a wonderful portrait. I have had some experience in judgin’ paintin’s—" he was clerk in the Grand Central Store framed picture department once—"and I think I know what I’m talkin’ about."

Would you believe it, she commenced to unbend right off.

"It is a Sargent," says she.

Now I should have asked: "Sergeant of militia, or what?" and upset the whole calabash; but Jim Henry knew better. He bows, solemn and wise, and says he’d been sure of it right along.

"But any painter," he says, "would have made a success with a subject like that gentleman before him. There is somethin’ about him, the height of his brow, and his wonderful eyes, etcetery, which reminds me—You’ll excuse me, Miss Pendlebury, but isn’t that a portrait of one of your near 

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