[THE TRAIN BOY'S FORTUNE.]
BY ELIOT McCORMICK.
I.
"Papers! Harper's Weekly! Bazar! All the monthly magazines!"
Jim Richards wished that he might have a dollar for every time he had repeated that cry. He was sure he had said it, during the three years he had been train-boy on the road between Philadelphia and New York, as many as fifty thousand times. Even ten cents each time would give him five thousand dollars. What could he not do with as much money as that? His mother should have a new dress, for one thing. He would give little Pete for his birthday the box of tin soldiers in the toy-shop window; and Lizzie, for hers, the doll on which her heart was set. Then they would all move into a new house somewhere in the country, instead of their wretched tenement in New York. Jim himself would give up his place as train-boy and go into the company's machine shop, which he could not do now, because his earnings from the sale of the papers were pretty good, while the machine-shop wages would be for some time small. But these were dreams; the train was approaching Trenton, where Jim would find the New York evening papers, and he had still to go through the last car. It was Saturday evening, and he must make enough to buy his mother's Sunday dinner.
"Papers!" he cried, slamming the door after him, and beginning to lay them one by one in the laps of the passengers. The first passenger was an old gentleman, and in his lap Jim laid a copy of a weekly paper.
"Take it away!" exclaimed the old man. "I don't want it."
Jim, in his hurry, had passed on without hearing.
"What! You won't, eh?" the old man went on, provoked by Jim's seeming inattention. "Then I'll get rid of it myself."
Crumpling it up into a ball, he turned around and threw it violently down the aisle, narrowly missing Jim's head, and landing it in the lap of an old lady on the opposite side.