So I was delighted. He said
that Uncle will make a first class "street man," and that
he has arranged for a line of goods for him and that he
has a "territory" that Uncle can occupy. He showed me a
flat cardboard box filled with lead pencils and shoe-strings
and little badges and buttons with inscriptions on them,
and he says these are what is called a "line," and that
Uncle can take out this line and do splendidly. I don't
quite understand yet who makes the appointment to be a
street man or what influence it takes or what it means
to have a territory, but Mr. Peters explained that there
is a man who is retiring from being a street man and that
Uncle can take his place and can have both sides of the
Bowery, which sounds very pretty indeed.
At first I didn't understand--because Mr. Peters hesitated
a good deal in telling me about it--that if Uncle gets
this appointment, it will mean that he will sell things
in the street. But as soon as I understood this I felt
that Uncle William would scorn to do anything like this,
as the degradation would be the same as being President
of the Steel Corporation. So I was much surprised to find
that when Uncle came in he didn't look at it that way at
all.
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