Peter Kindred

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XI TTTlTH the first sluggishness of spring in the ' city, Peter's weekly salary was doubled. The amazing part of it was that it came entirely unexpected, the result of happy chance and a flare of impudence. It so happened that a very particular idea was needed for a very particular company that manufactured an excessively mediocre line of jellies. "Oh, the devil," Peter said idly, when he heard about it, "why not take a lot of howling big space and advertise in direct public letters to the "White House?" "Do you mean to the President, Kindred?" asked a solicitor, who overheard him. "No," said Peter with what he imagined was comic seriousness, "what would he do with a lot of jellies? To the President's wife, of course." "There's something in that, you know," the solicitor muttered. And the preposterous idea was taken, and the wages of the horrified Peter were doubled. The next Saturday, with thirty dollars in his pocket, he walked home slowly, up Fifth Avenue and through the Park, from Fifty-ninth Street, and then east again at Seventy-second. In the Park the turgid breaking of winter was apparent. The sun of late afternoon slanted across the distant roof tops of the west side in full yellow, and a moist wind, grave and chilly, blew at him from the east. Old and forgotten snow lay scattered, half ice, half melted, gray with the passage of days, like tufts of dingy cotton caught in the crevices of rocks. There was a sweet smell of wet, sunwarmed, brown earth, and it mingled and drifted with the odor of asphalt, of pavements, of oil and motors and old gray snow. Here in the Park there was comparative quiet, save for the inescapable murmur of the city, and Peter let his thoughts drift to Cambridge. To Cambridge . . . there was a deal...