criss-crossed with a knife—the kind the butchers hide and take home, knowing what is the best.
“‘Shoveling coal,’ says he, ‘and piling bricks and loading drays. But they gave out, and I had to resign. I was born for a halberdier, and I’ve been educated for twenty-four years to fill the position. Now, quit knocking my profession, and pass along a lot more of that ham.’ ‘I’m holding the closing exercises,’ says he, ‘of a fortyeight-hour fast.’
“The second night he was on the job he walks down from his corner to the cigar-case and calls for cigarettes. The customers at the tables all snicker out loud to show their acquaintance with history. The boss is on.
“‘An’—let’s see—oh, yes—‘An anarchism,’ says the boss. ‘Cigarettes was not made at the time when halberdiers was invented.’
“‘The ones you sell was,’ says Sir Percival. ‘Caporal wins from chronology by the length of a cork tip.’ So he gets ’em and lights one, and puts the box in his brass helmet, and goes back to patroling the Rindslosh.
“He made a big hit, specially with the ladies. Some of ’em would poke him with their fingers to see if he was real or only a kind of a stuffed figure like they burn in elegy. And when he’d move they’d squeak, and make eyes at him as they went up to the slosh. He looked fine in his halberdashery. He slept at $2 a week in a hall-room on Third Avenue. He invited me up there one night. He had a little book on the washstand that he read instead of shopping in the saloons after hours. ‘I’m on to that,’ says I, ‘from reading about it in novels. All
