"GOOD MORNING! I'm getting the information for the new city directory. May I step in and rest a moment while I'm asking you a few questions?"
"Well, ye—es, I reckon yuh kin come in and set," conceded the old lady who had answered my knock, "but I won't give yuh no order. Mister. I haint much of a booker."
"Oh, I don't sell the books," I hastened to assure her, as I laid my sample volume on the floor by my chair and placed my hat on it. "I just go around from house to house gathering the names for it. The company publishes and sells the book. I don't have anything to do with that part of it."
"Oh, you jes' do th' authorin'? It must take yuh consid'ble time to write as big a book as that! Do yuh do it all 'lone?"
"No; we have fifty-four men working on it now, and it will take about two months to get it all. Now may I ask—?"
"How much does it cost?"
"This year they will sell for fifteen dollars—"
"Apiece!" she shrilled. "My land o' livin'! Whoever buys th' things?"
"All the big stores keep them, especially the drug stores, for the benefit of the public, you know. Now your name is—?"
"Well, what's it all 'bout, anyhow?" she insisted. "An' what's it fur? Is it a tillyphone dickshanary?"
"Something like that. It contains the names and addresses of everybody living in this city, and all the big establishments keep one so that if anybody wishes to find out where anyone else lives they just go in some store and look in this directory and there it is, Now, will you give me your name for the new book, please?"
"My name? W'y, my name is—Now, is this a-goin' to cost me anything? Yuh know I said I wouldn't take none afore I let yuh in."
"It will not cost you a cent," I told her earnestly, "and it may do you some good. See"—running through the leaves of the book in which I entered the statistics—"how many people I have interviewed this morning, and all of them gave me the information I asked for. Now you will see all there is to it; right down here on this top line I write your name—what did you say it was?"
"I never said yit; but it was Cook."
"Ah!" We were off at last! "Cook"—I paused at the "k" and asked, "Do you spell it the short way or with an 'e'?"
"Which?"
"How do you spell it? 'C-double-o-k,' or 'C-double-o-k-e'?"
