It’s a queer world, and no mistake.”  
Jim looked unusually grave, as he gave Johnny the benefit of these words of wisdom. Johnny was on his way home from school, and he had stopped to show Jim a certain knife, about which they had a good deal, at various times. It had four blades, one of them a file-blade; it was strongly made, but pretty too, with a nice smooth white handle, and a little nickel plate on one side, for the fortunate owner’s name. They had first made its acquaintance from the outside of a shop-window, where it lay in a tray with about a dozen others of various kinds, all included in the wonderful statement,—
 
“Your choice for fifty cents!”
 
Johnny and Jim had both chosen immediately, but as Johnny, who was beginning to take an interest in politics, remarked, it was one thing to nominate a knife, and quite another to elect it! A slight difficulty lay in the way of their walking boldly into the store, and announcing their choice; neither of them had, at that precise moment, floating capital to the amount of fifty cents!
 
 
“And some fellow who has fifty cents will be sure to snap up such a bargain before the day’s over,” said Johnny, mournfully. “What fun it must be to be rich, Jim; just to walk into a store when you see anything you like, and say, ‘I’ll take that,’ without even stopping to ask how much it is.”
 
“Yes, it sounds as if it would be,” said Jim, “but though I can’t exactly say that I’m intimate with many of ’em, it does seem to me, looking at it from the outside, as it were, that they get less sugar for a cent than some of us ’umble sons of poverty do!”
 
And Jim in a manner which Johnny admired all the more because he was unable to imitate it.
 
“I don’t see how you can tell,” said Johnny, “and I think you must be mistaken, Jim.”
 
“Well now, for instance,” replied Jim, who delighted in an argument, “I’m taking what the newspaper-poetry-man would call an ever-fresh delight in those three jolly warm nightshirts your mother had made for me. I’d never have saved the money for ’em in the world, if she hadn’t kept me up to it, and I feel as proud as Cuffee, every time I put one on, to think I paid for every stitch of it—I can’t help feeling sort of sorry that it wouldn’t be the correct thing to wear them on the street. Now do you suppose your millionaire finds any fun in buying nightshirts? I guess not! And that’s only one thing out of dozens of the same sort. See?”
 
“Yes,” answered Johnny, thoughtfully, “I see what you mean; I didn’t think of it in that way, before. But, all the same, I’d be willing to try being a millionaire for a day or two. And I do wish the fellow in there would kind of pile up the other knives over that white one till I can raise money enough to buy it!”
 
It is needless to say that the shopkeeper did not act upon this suggestion—perhaps because he did not hear it; and yet, by some singular chance, day after day passed, and still the white-handled knife remained unsold. And then Johnny’s uncle came to say goodbye, before going on a long business journey, and just as he was leaving, he put a bright half dollar in his nephew’s hand, saying,—
 
“I’ll not be here to help keep your birthday this year, my boy, so will you buy an appropriate present for a young man of your age and inches, and give it to yourself, with my love?”
 
Would he? Uncle Rob knew all about that knife, in less than five minutes, and then, as soon as he was gone, Johnny begged hard to be allowed to go out after dark, “just this once,” to secure the knife; he felt so sure that it would be gone the next morning!
 
But it was not. And its presence in his pocket, during school hours, had a rather bad effect upon his pursuit of knowledge. On his way home, as I have said, he stopped to show his newly-acquired treasure to Jim, and he was a little disappointed that Jim did not seem more sympathetic with his joy, but simply said, thoughtfully,—
 
“It’s a queer world, and no mistake!”
 
“I don’t see anything so very queer about it, myself,” said Johnny, , adding, with a little of having the best of it, for once, with Jim, “papa says, that if we think more than two people are queer to us, we may be pretty sure that we are the queer ones, and that the rest of the world is about as usual—at least, that’s the sense of what he said; I don’t remember the words exactly.”
 
“I wasn’t thinking of myself just then, for a wonder!” said Jim, with the slightly mocking expression on his face which Johnny did not like. “It’s a good enough world for me, but when I see a little chap like Taffy getting all the kicks and none of the halfpence, I don’t know exactly what to think. He’s taken a new turn, lately; twisted up with pain, half the time, and as weak as a kitten, the other half.”
 
“Where is he, anyhow?” asked Johnny.
 
“Well,” said Jim, turning suddenly red under his coat of tan, “I’ve got him round at my place. The fact is, it was too unhandy for me to go and look after him at that other place; it was noisy, too. He didn’t like it.”
 
Several questions rose to Johnny’s lips, but he repressed them; he had discovered that nothing so embarrassed Jim as being caught in some good work. So he only asked,—
 
“But how did my new ............