"Well, our luck has turned at last!" said he, brightly. "I knew it would."
"Have you found a place?" I inquired, with but little interest.
"Yes," he answered. "And what is better, I have found a place for you, too."
"What is it?" I asked, with some little hope.
"I went to answer an advertisement calling for agents willing to travel abroad," said Marmaduke, "and I found a firm of dealers in notions who wanted two young men to go to Corea and sell a miscellaneous cargo."
"Corea? Where's Corea?" I asked, for I had only a vague notion of the country.
"Don't know, I'm sure," said Marmaduke, as if impatient of the interruption; "but the old man I saw was quite confidential with me. He told me that his firm had bought a large number of roller-skates and did n't quite know what to do with them."
"Why don't they sell them?"
"They can't. These are the old-fashioned kind. They fasten with straps," Marmaduke explained, "and all the new roller-skates fasten with clamps. So there is no market for them in this country."
"And why do they think they will sell in Corea?" I asked, but with little interest, for the whole scheme seemed to me very absurd. "How did the firm come to buy them?"
"There's a queer story about that," said Marmaduke earnestly. "They told me about it in confidence; but I can tell you, because we are going into this enterprise together."
"You 're sure of that?" I asked, smiling in spite of myself.
"It's a splendid chance!" said Marmaduke. "The way they came to buy them was this: the senior partner of the firm is getting old and is a little shaky in his intellect, but he loves to buy things; and as his partners are his sons, they don't like to interfere with his
