THE next piece of news was when Dad told me that he had hired Uncle Rob to clerk in the store for the Winter. I was mighty pleased, but I knew that Uncle Rob had never clerked before, and that he was up against something which was going to give him some experience that would make his hair curl, and so I felt a little bit sorry for him. You see, our store was the kind that you always find in a town of about ten or twelve thousand people, and carried about everything outside of dry-goods and groceries and hardware. It was a big three-story brick building, and there were pianos, and organs, and silverware, and plush goods, and books, and stationery, and pictures, and a picture-framing department upstairs, and toys, and holiday stuff,—and five million other things. It takes some time to learn a stock like that. I knew it pretty well, because I'd been browsing around the place ever since I was big enough to walk, and so Dad said I'd better go down with Uncle Rob the first day, which
