I took it from his hand and looked and said,—for it is well to take an occasional step towards the Kingdom of Heaven,—that I was certain it was seventy-five.
“Well,” said the man, “perhaps it is, my sight is not so good now. I’ve had too much to do here and the work’s been using me up some.”
I noticed now as he said this how frail he looked as he bent over his counter wrapping up the tooth brush.
“I’ve no sealing wax,” he said, “or not handy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I answered, “just put it in the paper.”
Over the way of course the tooth brush would have been done up almost instantaneously, in white enamel paper, sealed at the end and stamped with a label, as fast as the money paid for it went rattling along an automatic carrier to a cashier.
“You’ve been very busy, eh?” I asked.
“Well, not so much with customers,” he said, “but with fixing up the place,”—here he glanced about him. Heaven only knows what he had fixed. There were no visible signs of it.
“You see I’ve only been in here a couple of months. It was a pretty tough looking place when I came to it. But I’ve been getting things fixed. First thing I did I put those two carboys in the window with the lights behind them. They show up fine, don’t they?”
“Fine!” I repeated; so fine indeed that the dim yellow light in them reached three or four feet from the jar. But for the streaming light from the great store across the street, the windows of the little shop would have been invisible.