buy a new chest-of-drawers.

This, as I have stated before, was about a year ago. Yesterday I paid my
hosier and haberdasher another visit. If all the bone factories had not
been too exclusively engaged, etc., etc., I wished to buy a collar stud.
There was an elderly man standing in the shop. He was quite alone,
contemplating a mountain of garments. There were little vesties,
double-width vestums, and ordinary woollen affairs.

You could have knocked me over with a dress-sock.

And where was my hosier and haberdasher? Had the stranger--just awakened
to the value of his possessions--entered the shop and suddenly cast all
this treasure upon the counter? I imagined the shock of this procedure
on a man like my hosier and haberdasher, whose heart was perhaps a
trifle woolly. Had he collapsed? I glanced surreptitiously behind a
parapet of clocked socks.

A moment later, from somewhere in the back premises, he appeared
carrying a large bale of flannel, which he cast caber-wise upon the
counter. I was dumbfounded.

Then I knew the truth.

"Sir," I said, turning to the stranger, "I believe you are about to make
a selection from these articles (I indicated them individually), which
you imagine to be the last of their race?"

He nodded at me in a bewildered sort of way.