get in days of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got
it all, I don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less
out of the newspapers.

In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only
little bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There
they read the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on
it, in the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a
college president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry
Mullins and Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know
just what I mean.

And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff's conversation was that he
could suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination
about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up
sideways as he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper:
"I see where Saint Louis has took four straight games off
Chicago,"--and so hold him fascinated to the end.

In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says that
this 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate."

To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the
relations of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.

But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversation
was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with
the right kind of head could make.

I've known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended