by township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly a hand’s-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present.

Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of that swell company, and I didn’t know just how to get at it — with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial sort; so I said:

“And Marco, there’s another thing which you must permit — out of kindness for Jones — because you wouldn’t want to offend him. He was very an11ous to testify his appreciation in some way, but he is so diffident he couldn’t venture it himself, and so he begged me to buy some