swallow the dealers’ flies!  And here am I, who can paint any blamed thing from a hen-coop to a battle scene, doing signs for tobacco shops; and there is Sam, who can do Corots and Rousseaus and Daubignys by the yard, obliged to stick to a varnish pot and a scraper!  Damnable, isn’t it?  But we don’t growl, do we, Sammy?  When Sammy has anything left over, he brings half of it down to me—­he lives on the floor above—­and when I get a little ahead and Sammy is behind, I send it up to him.  We are the Siamese twins, Sammy and I, aren’t we, Sam?  Where are you, anyway?  Oh, he’s after the dog, I see, moving the canvases so the little beggar won’t run a thumb-tack in his paw.  Sam can no more resist a dog, my dear Mr. O’Day, than a drunkard can a rum-mill, can you, Sam?”

“At it again, are you, Nat?” wheezed the wizened old gentleman, dusting his fingers as he reappeared from behind the canvases, his watery eyes edged with a deeper red, due to his exertions.  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Mr. O’Day.  What he says isn’t half true, and the half that is true isn’t worth listening to.  Now tell me about that frame he’s ordered.  He don’t want it, and I’ve told him so.  If you are willing to lend it to him, he’ll pay you for it when the picture is sold, which will never be, and by that time he’ll—­”

“Dry up, you old varnish pot!” shouted Ganger. “how do you know I won’t pay for it?”

“Because your picture will never be hung—­that’s why!”

“Mr. Ganger did not want to buy it,” broke in Felix, between puffs from one of his host’s corn-cob pipes.  “He wanted to exchange something for it—­’swap’ he called it.”

“Oh, well,” wheezed Sam, “that’s another thing. 
What were you going to give him in return, Nat? 
Careful, now—­there’s not much left.”

“Oh, maybe some old stuff, Sammy.  Move along, you blessed little child—­and you, too, Jane Hoggson!  You’re sitting on my Venetian wedding-chest—­real, too!  I bought it forty years ago in Padua.  There are some old embroideries down in the bottom, or were, unless Sam has been in here while I—­ Oh, no, here they are!  Beg pardon, Sammy, for suspecting you.  There—­what do you think of these?”

Felix bent over the pile of stuffs, which, under Ganger’s continued dumpings, was growing larger every minute—­the last to see the light being part of a priest’s Cope and two chasubles.

“There—­that is enough!” said Felix.  “This chasuble alone is worth more than the frame.  We will put the Florentine frame at ten dollars and the vestment at fifteen.  What others have you, Mr. Ganger?  There’s a great demand for these things when they are good, and these are good.  Where did you get them?”

“Worth more than the frame?  Holy Moses!” whistled Ganger.  “Why, I thought you’d want all there was in the chest!  And you say there are people out of a lunatic asylum looking for rags like this?” And he held up one end of the cope.