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and in three years it is yours if you don't lose the
receipts.

She gave me a glad smile and I felt a thrill of encouragement.
"Excuse me," I said, "but I am looking for a birthday present for my
wife which will make all the neighbors jealous, and which I can use
afterwards as an ash-receiver or a pocket flask."
The young lady cut out the giggles and pointed to the northwest.
I went over there.
To my surprise I found another counter.
A pale young woman was behind it.
I was just about to ask her the fatal question when a young man
wearing a ragtime expression on his face rushed up and said to the
young lady behind the counter, "I am looking for a suitable present for
a young lady friend of mine with golden brown hair. Could you please
suggest something?"
The saleslady showed her teeth and answered him in a low, rumbling
voice, and the man went away.
Then came an old lady who said, "I bought some organdie dress goods
for a shirt-waist last Tuesday and I would like to exchange them for a
music box for my daughter's little boy, Freddie, if you please!"
The saleslady again showed her teeth and the old lady ducked for
cover.
After about fifty people had rushed up to the saleslady and then rushed
away again, I went over and spoke to her.
"I am looking," I said, "for a birthday present for my wife. I want to get
something that will give her a great amount of pleasure and which I can
use later on as a pipe cleaner or a pair of suspenders!"
The saleslady fainted, so I moved over.

At another counter another young lady said to me, "Have you been
waited on?"
"No," I replied; "I have been stepped on, sat on and walked on, but I
have not yet been waited on."
"What do you wish?" inquired the young woman.
"I am looking for a birthday present for my wife," I said. "I want to buy
her something that will bring great joy to her heart and which I might
use afterwards as a pair of slippers or a shaving mug."
The young lady caught me with her dreamy eyes and held me up
against the wall.
"You," she screamed; "you complete a total of 23,493 people who have
been in this department store to-day without knowing what they are
doing here, and I refuse to be a human encyclopaedia for the sake of
eight dollars a week. On your way for yours!"
I began to apologize, but she reached down under the counter and
pulled out a club.
"This," she said, with a wild look in her side lamps; "this is the happy
summer season, but, nevertheless, the next guy that leaves his brains at
home and tries to make me tell him what is a good birthday present for
his wife will get a bitter swipe across the forehead!"
It was up to me, so I went home without a present.

JOHN HENRY ON AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHY
Peaches, my wife, acquired the amateur photography bug last week,
and it was really surprising how quickly she laid the foundation of a
domestic Rogue's Gallery.
She bought a camera and went after everybody and everything in the

neighborhood.
She took about eight million views of our country home before she
discovered that the camera wasn't loaded properly, which was tough on
Peaches but good for the bungalow.
Like everything else in this world picture pinching from still life
depends entirely on the point of view.
If your point of view is all right it's an easy matter to make a four dollar
dog-house look like the villa of a Wall Street broker at Newport.
Ten minutes after my wife had brought the camera home she had me
set up as a statue all over the lawn, and she was snapping at me like a
Spitz doggie at a peddler.
I sat for two hundred and nineteen pictures that forenoon, so I suppose
if she snapped like a Spitz I must have looked like a Setter.
Anyway, before I was through setting I felt like a hen, but when she
tried to coax me to climb up on a limb of a tree and stay there till she
got a picture of me looking like an owl, I swore softly in three
languages, fell over the back fence, and ran for my life.
When I rubbershoed it back that afternoon my wife was busy
developing her crimes.
The proper and up-to-date caper in connection with taking snap shots
these days is to buy a developing outfit and upset the household from
pit to dome while you are squeezing out pictures of every dearly
beloved friend