“Is it a museum?” asked Freddy politely, as he and Dan peered doubtful over the dusky threshold.
“Wal, no, not exactly; though it’s equal to that, sonny. Folks call this here Jonah’s junk-shop,—Jonah being my Christian name. (I ain’t never had much use for any other.) I’ve been here forty years, and my father was here before me,—buying and selling whatever comes to us. And things do come to us sure, from copper kettles that would serve a mess of sixty men, down to babies’ bonnets.”
“Babies’ bonnets!” laughed Dan, who, with Freddy close behind him, had pushed curiously but cautiously into the low, dark room, from which opened another and another, crowded with strangely assorted merchandise.
“You may laugh,” said the proprietor, “but we’ve had more than a dozen trunks and boxes filled with such like folderols. Some of ’em been here twenty years or more,—shawls and bonnets and ball dresses, all frills and laces and ribbons; baby bonnets, too, all held for duty and storage or wreckage and land knows what. Flung the whole lot out for auction last year, and the women swarmed like bees from the big hotels and the cottages. Got bits of yellow lace, they said, for ten cents that was worth many dollars. The men folks tried to ‘kick’ about fever and small-pox in the old stuff, but not a woman would listen. Look at that now!” And the speaker paused under a chandelier that, even in the dusky dimness, glittered with crystal pendants. “Set that ablaze with the fifty candles it was made to hold, and I bet a hundred dollars wouldn’t have touched it forty years ago. Ye can buy it to-morrow for three and a quarter. That’s the way things go in Jonah’s junk-shop.”
“And do you ever really sell anything?” asked Dan, whose keen business eye, being trained by early bargaining for the sharp needs of life, could see nothing in Jonah’s collection worth a hard-earned dollar. Mirrors with dingy and broken frames loomed ghost-like up in the dusky corners; tarnished epaulets and sword hilts told pathetically of forgotten honors; there were clocks, tall and stately, without works or pendulum.
“Sell?” echoed the proprietor. “Of course, sonny, we sell considerable, specially this time of year when the rich folks come around,—folks that ain’t looking for stuff that’s whole or shiny. And they do bite curious, sure. Why, there was some sort of a big man come up here in his yacht a couple of years ago that gave me twenty-five dollars for a furrin medal,—twenty-five dollars cash down. And it wasn’t gold or silver neither. Said he knew what it was worth, and I didn’t.”
“Twenty-five dollars!” exclaimed the astonished Freddy,—“twenty-five dollars for a medal! O Dan, then maybe yours is worth something, too.”
“Pooh, no!” said Dan, “what would poor old Nutty be doing with a twenty-five dollar medal?”
The dull eyes of the old junk dealer kindled with quick interest.
“Hev you got a medal?” he asked. “Where did you get it?”