"You see," said he, finally; "I'd like to give you more, but you know how it is ... look at these linings and buttonholes! Honestly, I don't really care about them at all—but—really a dollar and a half is the best I can do on them...." And he eyed the poet's clothes with contempt.
"A dollar seventy-five," said the poet, standing firm.
"All right," at last said the gentleman from Palestine, "but I don't see where I am to make any profit; however—" And he handed out the small, dirty money.
Then the poet bowed him out gently, saying in his heart:
"Now I can buy my rose!"
When the Palestinian dealer in old dress-suits went home—after sadly leaving behind him that dollar seventy-five—he made an astonishing discovery.
In the necessary process of re-examining the "goods," something fell out of one of the pockets, something the poet, after his nature, had quite forgotten. The old-clothes man, now a publisher, picked them up from the floor and gazed at them in delight. The poet, in his grandiose carelessness, had forgotten to empty his pockets of various old dreams!
Now, to be fair to the gentleman from Palestine, he belonged to a race that loves dreams, and, to do him justice, he forgot all about the profit he was to make of the poor poet's clothes, as he sat, cross-legged, on the floor, and read the dreams that had fallen from the pocket of the poet's old dress-suit. He read on and read on, and laughed and cried—such a curious treasure-trove, such an odd medley of fairy tales and fables and poems had fallen out of the poet's pocket—and it was only later that the thought came to him that he might change from an old-clothes man into a publisher of dreams.
Now, these are some of the dreams that fell out of the poet's pocket.