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contrived. You fed in loaves of pumpernickel bread and pats of nut butter on one side, hardboiled eggs and lettuce and dressing on the other, and out came egg-salad sandwiches through a slot, as neat as you could want to see. But the best of his stunts was a sort of miniature vacuum cleaner which the waitresses used for taking the crumbs off the tables. You've seen those little hot-air pistols they use at swell shoe-shining stands to dry the liquid cleanser off your shoes before they put on the polishing paste? Well, Larsen's decrumbing machine, as we used to call it, looked rather like those. You screwed a plug into an electric light socket, ran the little gun over the table, and in a jiffy it sucked up crumbs and cigarette ashes and spilled lentils and matches, and left the cloth neat. Larsen was so proud of it he said he was going to patent it.

"I never cared so very much for the old man, he was a little too eccentric; and I began to think, after a while, that he used his daughter a little too crudely as a business bait; but he was full of ideas. He had a big motor-truck that he used to cruise around town, visiting the markets himself, to get the pick of the vegetables; and he was always tinkering with that truck, planning new mechanical tricks of some kind. He had an insatiable