“Yes,” said Mr. Dalrymple, scratching his gray head reflectively.  “Yes, that’s the same soap.  I’ll take it.  I’ll be as good as my word.  Where’d you get it, Frank?”

“At Bixom’s auction up here,” he replied, frankly and blandly.

Mr. Dalrymple had the drayman bring in the soap; and after some formality—­because the agent in this case was a boy—­made out his note at thirty days and gave it to him.

Frank thanked him and pocketed the note.  He decided to go back to his father’s bank and discount it, as he had seen others doing, thereby paying his father back and getting his own profit in ready money.  It couldn’t be done ordinarily on any day after business hours; but his father would make an exception in his case.

He hurried back, whistling; and his father glanced up smiling when he came in.

“Well, Frank, how’d you make out?” he asked.

“Here’s a note at thirty days,” he said, producing the paper Dalrymple had given him.  “Do you want to discount that for me?  You can take your thirty-two out of that.”

His father examined it closely.  “Sixty-two dollars!” he observed.  “Mr. Dalrymple!  That’s good paper!  Yes, I can.  It will cost you ten per cent.,” he added, jestingly.  “Why don’t you just hold it, though?  I’ll let you have the thirty-two dollars until the end of the month.”

“Oh, no,” said his son, “you discount it and take your money.  I may want mine.”

His father smiled at his business-like air.  “All right,” he said.  “I’ll fix it to-morrow.  Tell me just how you did this.”  And his son told him.

At seven o’clock that evening Frank’s mother heard about it, and in due time Uncle Seneca.

“What’d I tell you, Cowperwood?” he asked.  “He has stuff in him, that youngster.  Look out for him.”

Mrs. Cowperwood looked at her boy curiously at dinner.  Was this the son she had nursed at her bosom not so very long before?  Surely he was developing rapidly.

“Well, Frank, I hope you can do that often,” she said.

“I hope so, too, ma,” was his rather noncommittal reply.

Auction sales were not to be discovered every day, however, and his home grocer was only open to one such transaction in a reasonable period of time, but from the very first young Cowperwood knew how to make money.  He took subscriptions for a boys’ paper; handled the agency for the sale of a new kind of ice-skate, and once organized a band of neighborhood youths into a union for the purpose of purchasing their summer straw hats at wholesale.  It was not his idea that he could get rich by saving.  From the first he had the notion that liberal spending was better, and that somehow he would get along.