The Beggar's Purse by Samuel Hopkins Adams

Author:Samuel Hopkins Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634211604
Publisher: Duke Classics

At first he thought it a misprint; it must be thirty cents; or possibly fifty. Consideration of the other vegetables dispelled that hope. They were on an equal scale. But—eighty cents for one green pepper! Was there, then, a fatal shortage in the green-pepper market? Or a crop failure in the rice or tomatoes whereof the stuffing was compounded?

"Cut it short!

Be a sport!

Buy a quart!"

shrieked the songsters, coyly adjusting their shoulder straps.

Enlightenment burst upon E. Van Tenner. The prices of the menu, suggesting the daily stock market report before the depression, became clear. Somehow that awful vocality and the hardly less agonizing accompaniment had to be paid for. His green pepper at eighty cents was to pay for it. It was stuffed, that green pepper, not with rice and tomato but with ragtime jazzeries and syncopated shrieks. E. Van Tenner laid the menu on the table and would have risen and escaped, but there hovered over him, portentous and awful, the head waiter himself.

"You haf ordered?" he inquired.

"I—that is—no; I think I won't order this evening," quavered the patron.

"There is a table charch of one dollar," said the official severely.

E. Van Tenner, overawed, reached for the beggar's purse. It flatly refused to open. As the owner strove with it there was instilled into his veins a calm and chill determination, born of a discovery that he had made—or had the purse magically indicated it?—regarding the menu.

"I shall not pay it," he said quietly.

"You shouldt haf to pay it." The head waiter's threatening tone took on a little more pronounced accent.

"You're a German, aren't you?" inquired E. Van Tenner blandly.

"Dot is my bisaness," retorted the other excitedly. "You pay dot table charch!"

"No; I shall not pay the table charge. But I will do this: I will pay you one dollar for that menu card, which, I observe, has on it two, four, seven, eleven—eleven different kinds of meat, on a Meatless Tuesday! Come; what do you say?"

The head waiter said nothing. His jaw dropped. He put his hand to his chin undecidedly, then turned and fled, taking the card with him. Glowing with virtue—which, after all, was the purse's, not his—E. Van Tenner departed, not even tipping the coat-room attendant, to such heights was his courage inspired, and found a chop-house where he supped excellently on a strict Hoover basis, and entered an estimated saving of eighty-five cents, and ten cents extra for the defrauded hat boy.

All that night he slept the deep, sweet sleep of one justified of good deeds. The beggar's purse, at least equally justified, slept equally well under his pillow. In the morning it started work for him again. It saved him the usual coat-room charge, and rudely checked his mildly emotional impulse to drop a quarter in the tin cup of a pitiable and shivering mendicant cripple who owns two tenement houses on the East Side and has amassed a small fortune by distraining on tenants' furniture. He hardly knew whether to repeat the entry on

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