was a character, was Tom; young, lively, conceited, and as imitative of a gentleman’s ways as a parrot is of human speech. The shop was as still as a church as I sat down in his chair and he returned with my mug. As he walked over toward me he tossed the cup in the air, caught it on the fly, and stopping under the chandelier, looked quizzingly at the inscription “S. T. 1860 X.” Everybody’s eye was on him. I felt that a catastrophe was near at hand, but I was hardly prepared for the ejaculation, uttered with an unction which those who never knew Thomas Johnson can not half appreciate, “Good nuf; how are you dis evening, Mr. Drake?”

The shout that went up in that shop would have made the fortune of any minstrel troupe ever organized, and I—well, I never went there again. Subsequently I appeared under the engaging nom-de-plume of “Alonzo Hutchings” with annoying experiences that are hardly worth mentioning, however, after the episode above described, and the grace with which Mr. Johnson relegated me to my proper sphere among the nomenclature of names.