of Sheraton knife urns” fetched the incredible sum of five hundred and fifty dollars.  Chippendale was another name unfamiliar in Slocum County, but Chippendale, it seemed, had once made a wing book-case which was now worth two hundred and forty dollars of some enthusiast’s money.  After that a Chippendale settee for a hundred and forty dollars and an “Empire table with 1830 base” for ninety-three dollars seemed the merest trifles of this insane outbreak.

The amount netted by the late owner of these things was reported with various exaggerations, which I never saw any good reason to correct.  As I have said, the thing was, and promises to remain forever in Little Arcady, a phenomenon to be explained by no known natural laws.  For a long time our ladies were too aghast even to marvel at it intelligibly.  When Aunt Delia McCormick in my hearing said, “Well, now, what a world this is!” and Mrs. Westley Keyts answered, “That’s very true!” I knew they referred to the Lansdale furniture.  It was typical of the prevailing stupefaction.

“It seems that a collector may be a gentleman,” said Miss Caroline, “but Mr. Cohen wasn’t even a collector!”

Then I told her the considerable sum now to her credit.  She drew a long breath and said, “Now!” and Clem, who stood by, almost cried, “Now, Little Miss!”

The Book of LITTLE MISS

CHAPTER XXII

THE TIME OF DREAMS

I had Clem to myself for a time.  Little Miss, it seemed, was not yet rugged enough for travel into the far Little Country.  Nor was she at once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work.  I suspect that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys.  I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline’s earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem’s own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from “brillions” of chickens not yet come even to the egg-stage of their careers.

Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases about “the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest manner”—­not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to permit herself the sweet alarms of hope.  Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother’s attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had “ever manifested” in the welfare of the Lansdales.