hand over his head, rumpling his hair a little. "An
expensive proposition, let me tell you, three girls. But
there's very little I don't know about babies, as you may
imagine."

But there settled over Fanny Brandeis' face the mask of
hardness that was so often to transform it.

The morning mail was in--the day's biggest grist, deluge of
it, a flood. Buyer and assistant buyer never saw the actual
letters, or attended to their enclosed orders. It was only
the unusual letter, the complaint or protest that reached
their desk. Hundreds of hands downstairs sorted, stamped,
indexed, filed, after the letter-opening machines had slit
the envelopes. Those letter-openers! Fanny had hung over
them, enthralled. The unopened envelopes were fed into
them. Flip! Zip! Flip! Out! Opened! Faster than eye
could follow. It was uncanny. It was, somehow, humorous,
like the clever antics of a trained dog. You could not
believe that this little machine actually performed what
your eyes beheld. Two years later they installed the sand-
paper letter-opener, marvel of simplicity. It made the
old machine seem cumbersome and slow. Guided by Izzy, the
expert, its rough tongue was capable of licking open six
hundred and fifty letters a minute.

Ten minutes after the mail came in the orders were being
filled; bins, shelves, warehouses, were emptying their
contents. Up and down the aisles went the stock clerks;
into the conveyors went the bundles, down the great spiral