personally at risk. The expectation this motif awakens in us is that Sammy will continue to underrate the world's dangers. At the story's end, however,he surprises us by overrating them--although with ludicrous and touching

The first of these dangers to present itself to Sammy is either penury or a neurotic meanness of spirit. The middle-aged customer who gives Sammy "hell" for ringing up her box of crackers twice is in Sammy's quick calculation, "about fifty," and a "witch" of the sort he's learned once flourished in nearby Salem. He notices the "rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows" but nothing else that might stir him in the direction of sympathy. That the malicious intent he silently accuses her of, and the "sheep"-like behavior, "like scared pigs in a chute," of the other "houseslaves in pin curlers" who draw his sarcastic ire, might have sources in something other than the one's motiveless malignity and the others' dullness of character, does not occur to Sammy. He call

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, Streets Sewers, McMahon Sammy, pineapple juice, mcmahon sammy,