"Dear Mrs. Pottle:
"I never laughed at anything in my life till I saw your pageant. I pay for what I get.
"Yours,
"Felix Winterbottom.
"P. S. Inclosed is my check for one thousand dollars
for the Day Nursery."
Mrs. Pottle sat up in bed. She smiled.
VI: The Cage Man
All day long they kept Horace Nimms in a steel-barred cage. For twenty-one years he had perched on a tall stool in that cage, while various persons at various times poked things at him through a hole about big enough to admit an adult guinea pig.
Every evening round five-thirty they let Horace out and permitted him to go over to his half of a double-barreled house in Flatbush to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning he returned to his cage, hung his two-dollar-and-eighty-nine-cent approximately Panama hat on a peg and changed his blue-serge-suit coat for a still more shiny alpaca. Then he sharpened two pencils to needle-point sharpness, tested his pen by writing "H. Nimms, Esq.," in a small precise hand, gave his adding machine a few preparatory pokes and was ready for the day's work.
Horace was proud, in his mild way, of being shut up in the cage with all that money. It carried the suggestion that he was a dangerous man of a possibly predatory nature. He wasn't. A more patient and docile five feet and two inches of cashier was not to be found between Spuyten Duyvil and Tottenville, Staten Island. Cashiers are mostly crabbed. It sours them somehow to hand out all that money and retain so little for their own personal use. But Horace was not of this ilk.
The timidest stenographer did not hesitate to take the pettiest petty-cash slip to his little window and twitter, according to custom: "Forty cents for carbon paper, and let me have it in large bills, please, Uncle Horace."
He would peer at the slip, pretend it was for forty dollars, smile a friendly smile that made little ripples round his eyes and—according to custom—reply: "Here you be. Now don't be buying yourself a flivver with it."