“Yes, oh, yes,” Reeves replied explosively. “Er—two pairs, please.”
Shult looked surprised. Fortune was favoring him beyond his wildest hopes. He muttered an incoherent answer. Then Stowell gravely paid him for the two pairs of intensely blue and shapeless objects in his lap and Shult made the exact change after repeated searches in three different pockets. At the door he turned.
“You are all very kind to me,” he said, gravely and earnestly. “I’m—I’m thankful to you.”
Stowell murmured politely.
After the door had closed there followed several moments of silence. Then a smile crept over Stowell’s face and was reflected on the faces of the others. But nobody laughed.
Possibly the reader recalls the epidemic of blue-woolen mittens that raged in college that winter. One saw them everywhere. The fashion started, they say, among a certain coterie of correct dressers in the freshman class and spread until it enveloped the entire undergraduate body. None could explain it, and none tried to; blue-woolen mitts were the proper thing; that was sufficient. At first the demand could not be supplied, but before the Midyears were over the Cooperative Society secured a quantity, and the furnishing stores followed its example as soon as possible. But blue-woolen mitts in sufficient quantities to fill the orders were difficult to find, and long before the shops had secured the trade in that commodity, one Shult, out of Michigan, had reaped a very respectable harvest and found a nickname which, despite the lapse of years and the accumulation of honors, still sticks—“Mittens.”
THE END
BY HEZEKIAH BUTTERWORTH.