money,--well, you know the way it acts on people in the larger
cities. It seemed to spoil one's idea of Jeff that copper and
asbestos and banana lands should form the goal of his thought when,
if he knew it, the little shop and the sunlight of Mariposa was so
much better.

In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his
perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item
out of the paper about them.

"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for
one of them observatories," he would say.

And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost
whisper: "Did you ever _see_ this Rockefeller?"

It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was
another side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa ever
knew, or will ever know now.

I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The
house,--I think I said it,--stood out behind the barber shop. You
went out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with
petunias beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the
light of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as
you came along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the
evenings when the shop got empty.

There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and
after supper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with