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قراءة كتاب The Beggar's Purse A Fairy Tale of Familiar Finance
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The Beggar's Purse A Fairy Tale of Familiar Finance
stuffed, that green pepper, not with rice and tomato but with ragtime jazzeries and syncopated shrieks. E. Van Tenner laid the menu on the table and would have risen and escaped, but there hovered over him, portentous and awful, the head waiter himself.
"You haf ordered?" he inquired.
"I—that is—no; I think I won't order this evening," quavered the patron.
"There is a table charch of one dollar," said the official severely.
E. Van Tenner, overawed, reached for the beggar's purse. It flatly refused to open. As the owner strove with it there was instilled into his veins a calm and chill determination, born of a discovery that he had made—or had the purse magically indicated it?—regarding the menu.
"I shall not pay it," he said quietly.
"You shouldt haf to pay it." The head waiter's threatening tone took on a little more pronounced accent.
"You're a German, aren't you?" inquired E. Van Tenner blandly.
"Dot is my bisaness," retorted the other excitedly. "You pay dot table charch!"
"No; I shall not pay the table charge. But I will do this: I will pay you one dollar for that menu card, which, I observe, has on it two, four, seven, eleven—eleven different kinds of meat, on a Meatless Tuesday! Come; what do you say?"
The head waiter said nothing. His jaw dropped. He put his hand to his chin undecidedly, then turned and fled, taking the card with him. Glowing with virtue—which, after all, was the purse's, not his—E. Van Tenner departed, not even tipping the coat-room attendant, to such heights was his courage inspired, and found a chop-house where he supped excellently on a strict Hoover basis, and entered an estimated saving of eighty-five cents, and ten cents extra for the defrauded hat boy.
All that night he slept the deep, sweet sleep of one justified of good deeds. The beggar's purse, at least equally justified, slept equally well under his pillow. In the morning it started work for him again. It saved him the usual coat-room charge, and rudely checked his mildly emotional impulse to drop a quarter in the tin cup of a pitiable and shivering mendicant cripple who owns two tenement houses on the East Side and has amassed a small fortune by distraining on tenants' furniture. He hardly knew whether to repeat the entry on the morning's taxi or not, since he felt it already a habit not to hire a cab when he could conveniently take a car. But he was clearly to the good on one item of a quarter, when in carrying his grip from the elevator he was charged upon by a livered youth. Horror was writ large in that youth's face; horror that a guest of the golden Von Gorder should carry a grip weighing almost four pounds across ten yards of floor alone and unaided. As Christian strove with Apollyon so strove E. Van Tenner with the liveried youth for that grip, which he finally delivered safe out of the enemy's hands, and himself bore, triumphant, to the street car.
In the returning train, where he won to the day coach through the stricken hopes of the embattled Red-Caps, he figured out his day's savings to date as follows:
Parlor car...................................................55
Pullman porter...............................................25
Red-Cap......................................................15
Cable car vs. taxi...........................................35
Chauffeur's blackmail........................................15
Pride of hotel room that went before a fall in price.......1.00
Washroom hold-up.............................................10
Coat check...................................................10
2d Chauffeur's supertax......................................25
Cocktail forgone.............................................25
3 Check-room petty larcenies.................................30
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