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FEW minutes before six o'clock that same afternoon, Mr. James Cricklewick, senior member of the firm of Cricklewick, Stackable & Co., linen merchants, got up from his desk in the crowded little compartment labelled "Private," and peered out of the second-floor window into the busy street below. Thousands of people were scurrying along the pavements in the direction of the brilliantly lighted Fifth Avenue, a few rods away; vague, dusky, unrecognizable forms in the darkness that comes so early and so abruptly to the cross-town streets at the end of a young March day. The middle of the street presented a serried line of snow heaps, piled up by the shovellers the day before,—symmetrical little mountains that formed an impassable range over which no chauffeur had the temerity to bolt in his senseless ambition to pass the car ahead.

Mr. James Cricklewick sighed. He knew from past experience that the Rock of Ages was but little more enduring than the snow-capped range in front of him. Time and a persistent sun inevitably would do the work of man, but in the meantime Mr. Cricklewick's wagons and trucks were a day and a half behind with deliveries, and that was worth sighing about. As he stood looking down the street, he sighed again. For more than forty years Mr. Cricklewick had made constant use of the phrase: "It's always something." If there