are all dole out. Straight now, are you?"

"Yes, sir, it does make me feel a little blue—been here so long. But it'll be awful good to get out at sea."

"Yuh, I know, Wrenn. I'd like to go traveling myself—I suppose you fellows think I wouldn't care to go bumming around like you do and never have to worry about how the firm's going to break even. But—Well, good-by, old man, and don't forget us. Drop me a line now and then and let me know how you're getting along. Oh say, if you happen to see any novelties that look good let us hear about them. But drop me a line, anyway. We'll always be glad to hear from you. Well, good-by and good luck. Sure and drop me a line."

In the corner which had been his home for eight years Mr. Wrenn could not devise any new and yet more improved arrangement of the wire baskets and clips and desk reminders, so he cleaned a pen, blew some gray eraser-dust from under his iron ink-well standard, and decided that his desk was in order; reflecting:

He'd been there a long time. Now he could never come back to it, no matter how much he wanted to…. How good the manager had been to him. Gee! he hadn't appreciated how considerut Guilfogle was!

He started down the corridor on a round of farewells to the boys. "Too bad he hadn't never got better acquainted with them, but it was too late now. Anyway, they were such fine jolly sports; they'd never miss a stupid guy like him."

Just then he met them in the corridor, all of them except
Guilfogle, headed by Rabin, the traveling salesman, and Charley
Carpenter, who was bearing a box of handkerchiefs with a large
green-and-crimson-paper label.

"Gov'nor Wrenn," orated Charley, "upon this suspicious occasion we have the pleasure of showing by this small token of our esteem our 'preciation of your untiring efforts in the investigation of Mortimer R. Gugglegiggle of the Graft Trust and—

"Say, old man, joking aside, we're mighty sorry you're going and—uh—well, we'd like to give you something to show we're—uh—mighty sorry you're going. We thought of a box of cigars, but you don't smoke much; anyway, these han'k'chiefs'll help to show—Three cheers for Wrenn, fellows!"

Afterward, by his desk, alone, holding the box of handkerchiefs with the resplendent red-and-green label, Mr. Wrenn began to cry.

He was lying abed at eight-thirty on a morning of late June, two weeks after leaving the Souvenir Company, deliberately hunting over his pillow for cool spots, very hot and restless in the legs and enormously depressed in the soul. He would have got up had there been anything to get up for. There was nothing, yet he felt uneasily guilty. For two weeks he had been afraid of losing, by neglect, the job he had already voluntarily given up. So there are men whom the fear of death has driven to suicide.

Nearly every morning he had driven himself from bed and had finished shaving before he was quite satisfied that he didn't have to get to the office on time. As he wandered about during the day he remarked with frequency, "I'm scared as teacher's pet playing hookey for the first time, like what we used to do in Parthenon." All proper persons were at work of a week-day afternoon. What, then, was he doing walking along the street when all morality demanded his sitting at a desk at the Souvenir Company, being a little more careful, to win the divine favor of Mortimer R. Guilfogle?

He was sure that if he were already out on the Great Traveling he would be able to "push the buzzer on himself and get up his nerve." But he did not know where to go. He had planned so many trips these years that now he couldn't keep any one of them finally decided on for more than an hour. It rather stretched his short arms to embrace at once a gay old dream of seeing Venice and the stern civic duty of hunting abominably dangerous beasts in the Guatemala bush.

The expense bothered him, too. He had through many years so persistently saved money for the Great Traveling that he begrudged money for that Traveling itself. Indeed, he planned to spend not more than $300 of the $1,235.80 he had now accumulated, on his first venture, during which he hoped to learn the trade of wandering.

He was always influenced by a sentence he had read somewhere about "one of those globe-trotters you meet carrying a monkey-wrench in Calcutta, then in raiment and a monocle at the Athenaeum." He would learn some Kiplingy trade that would teach him the use of astonishingly technical tools, also daring and the location of smugglers' haunts, copra islands, and whaling-stations with curious names.

He pictured himself shipping as third engineer at the Manihiki Islands or engaged for taking moving pictures of an aeroplane flight in Algiers. He had to get away from Zappism. He had to be out on the iron seas, where the battle-ships and liners went by like a marching military band. But he couldn't get started.

Once beyond Sandy Hook, he would immediately know all about engines and fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be shanghaied. But no matter how wistfully, no matter how late at night he timorously forced himself to loiter among unwashed English stokers on West Street, he couldn't get himself molested except by glib persons wishing ten cents "for a place to sleep."

When he had dallied through breakfast that particular morning he sat about. Once he had pictured sitting about reading travel-books as a perfect occupation. But it concealed no exciting little surprises when he could be a Sunday loafer on any plain Monday. Furthermore, Goaty never made his bed till noon, and the gray-and-brown-patched coverlet seemed to trail all about the disordered room.