'We might make it hamesucken under trust in Scotland,' said Logan, 'if it was done on the premises of the young lady's domicile.'

'We have not that elegant phrase in England,' said Merton. 'Perhaps it would have been a common assault; but, anyhow, it would have got into the newspapers. Never again be officer of mine, Miss Martin.'

'But how did all end happily?' asked Logan.

'Why, you may call it happily and so may the lovers, but I call it very disappointing,' said Miss Martin.

'Tell us all about it!' cried Logan.

'Well, I went down, simple as you see me.'

'Simplex munditiis!' said Merton.

'And was met at the station by young Mr. Warren. His father, with the wisdom of a Nonconformist serpent, had sent him alone to make my acquaintance and be fascinated. My things were put on a four-wheeler. I was all young enthusiasm in the manner of The Young Girl. He was a good-looking boy enough, though in a bowler hat, with turn-down collar. But he was gloomy. I was curious about the public buildings, ecstatic about the town hall, and a kind of Moeso-Gothic tabernacle (if it was not Moeso-Gothic in style I don't know what it was) where the Rev. Mr. Truman holds forth. But I could not waken him up, he seemed miserable. I soon found out the reason. The placards of the local newspapers shrieked in big type with

SPREAD OF SMALLPOX. 135 CASES.

When I saw that I took young Mr. Warren's hand.'

'Were you wearing the ring?' asked Merton.

'No; it was in my dressing-bag. I said, "Mr. Warren, I know what care clouds your brow. You are brooding over the fate of the young, the fair, the beloved—the unvaccinated. I know the story of your heart."

'"How the D—- I mean, how do you know, Miss Martin, about my private affairs?"

'"A little bird has told me," I said (style of The Young Girl, you know). "I have friends in Bulcester who esteem you. No, I must not mention names, but I come, not too late, I hope, to bring you security. She shall be preserved from this awful scourge, and you shall be her preserver." He wanted to know how it was to be done, of course, and after taking his word of honour for secrecy, I told him that the remedy would lie in his own hands, showed him the ring, and taught him how to work it. Mr. Squeers,' went on Miss Martin, 'had never wopped a boy in a cab before, and I had never beheld a scene of passionate emotion before—in a four-wheeler. He called me his preserver, he said that I was an angel, he knelt at my feet, and, if we had been on the stage—as Mr. Merton said—'

'And were you on the stage?' asked Merton.

'That is neither here nor there. It was an instructive experience, and you little know the treasures of passion that may lie concealed in the heart of a young oilcloth manufacturer.'

'Happy young oilcloth manufacturer!' murmured Merton.

'They are both happy, but I did not manage my fortunate conclusion in my own way. When young Mr. Warren had moderated the transports of his gratitude we were in the suburbs of Bulcester, where the mill-owners live in houses of the most promiscuous architecture: Tudor, Jacobean, Queen Anne, Bedford Park Queen Anne, chalets, Chineseries, "all standing naked in the open air," for the trees have not grown up round them yet. Then we came to a gate without a lodge, the cabman got down and opened it, and we were in the visible presence of Mr. Warren's villa. The style is the Scottish Baronial; all pepper-pots, gables and crowsteps.

'"What a lovely old place!" I said to my companion. "Have you secret passages and sliding panels and dark turnpike stairs? What a house for conspiracies! There is a real turret window; can't you fancy it suddenly shot up and the king's face popped out, very red, and bellowing, 'Treason!'"

'At that moment, when my imagination was in full career, the turret window was shot up, and a face, very red, with red whiskers, was popped out.

'"That is my father," said young Mr. Warren; and we alighted, and a very small maidservant opened the portals of the baronial hall, while the cabman carried up my trunk, and Mr. Warren, senior, greeted me in the hall.

'"Welcome to Bulcester!" he said, with a florid air, and "hoped James and I had made friends on the way," and then he actually winked! He is a widower, and I was dying for tea, but there we sat, and when the little maid came in, it was to say that a gentleman wanted to see Mr. Warren in the study. So he went out, and then, James being the victim of gratitude, I took my courage in both hands and asked if I might have tea. James said that they usually had it after the lecture was over, which would not be till nine, and that some people had been asked to meet me. Then I knew that I was got among a strange, outlandish race who eat strange meats and keep High Teas, and my spirit fainted within me.

'"Oh, Mr. James!" I said, "if you love me have a cup of tea and some bread-and-butter sent up to my room, and tell the maid to show me the way to it."

'So he sent for her, and she showed me to the best spare room, with oleographs of Highland scenery on the walls, and coloured Landseer prints, and tartan curtains, and everything made of ormolu that can be made of ormolu. In about twenty minutes the girl returned with tea and poached eggs and toast, and jam and marmalade. So I dressed for the lecture, which was to begin at eight—just when people ought to be dining—and came down into the drawing-room. The elder Mr. Warren was sitting alone, reading the Daily News, and he rose with an air of happy solemnity and shook hands again.

'"You can let James alone now, Miss Martin," he said, and he winked again, rubbed his hands, and grinned all over his expansive face.

'"Let James alone!" I said.

'"Yes; don't go upsetting the lad—he's not used to young ladies like you. You leave James to himself. James will do very well. I have a little surprise for James."

'He certainly had a considerable surprise for me, but I merely asked if it was James's birthday, which it was not.

'Luckily James entered. All his gloom was gone, thanks to me, and he was remarkably smiling and particularly attentive to myself. Mr. Warren seemed perplexed.

'"James, have you heard any good news?" he asked. "You seem very gay all of a sudden."

'James caught my eye.

'"No, father," he said. "What news do you mean? Anything in business? A large order from Sarawak?"

'Mr. Warren was silent, but presently took me into a corner on the pretence of showing me some horrible objet d'art—a treacly bronze.

'"I say," he said, "you must have made great play in the cab coming from the station. James looks a new man. I never would have guessed him to be so fickle. But, mind you, no more of it! Let James be—he will do very well."

'How was James to do very well? Why were my fascinations not to be exercised, as per contract? I began to suspect the worst, and I was thinking of nothing else while we drove to the premises of the Bulcester Literary Society. Could Jane have drowned herself out of the way, or taken smallpox, which might ruin her charms? Well, I had not a large audience, on account of fear of infection, I suppose, and all the people present wore the red badge, like Mr. Warren, only he wore one on each arm. This somewhat amazed me, but as I had never spoken in public before I was rather in a flutter. However, I conquered my girlish shyness, and if the audience was not large it was enthusiastic. When I came to the peroration about wishing them all happy endings and real beginnings of true life, don't you know, the audience actually rose at me, and cheered like anything. Then someone proposed, "Three cheers for young Warren," and they gave them like mad; I did not know why, nor did he: he looked quite pale. Then his father, with tears in his voice, proposed a vote of thanks to me, and said that he and the brave hearts of old Bulcester, his old friends and brothers in arms, were once more united; and the people stormed the platform and shook his hand and slapped him on the back. At last we got out by a back way, where our cab was waiting. Young Mr. Warren was as puzzled as myself, and his father was greatly overcome and sobbing in a corner. We got into the house, where people kept arriving, and at last a fine old clerical-looking bird entered with a red badge on one arm and a very pretty girl in white on the other. She had a red badge too.

'Young Mr. Warren, who was near me when they came in, gave a queer sort of cry, and then I understood! The girl was his Jane, and she had been vaccinated, also her father, that afternoon, owing to the awful panic the old man got into after reading the evening papers about the smallpox. The gentleman whom Mr. Warren went to see in the study, just after my arrival, had brought him this gratifying intelligence, and he had sent the gentleman back to ask the Trumans to a High Tea of reconciliation. The people at the lecture had heard of this, and that was why they cheered so for young Warren, because his affair was as commonly known to all Bulcester as that of Romeo and Juliet at Verona. They are hearty people at Bulcester, and not without elements of old English romance.

'Old Mr. Warren publicly embraced Jane Truman, and then brought her and presented her to me as James's bride. We both cried a little, I think, and then we all sat down to High Tea, and I am scarcely yet the woman I used to be. It was a height! And a weight! And a length! After tea Mr. Warren made a speech, and said that Bulcester had come back to him, and I was afraid that he would brag dreadfully, but he did not; he was too happy, I think. And then Mr. Truman made a speech and said that though they felt obliged to own that they had come to the conclusion that though Anti-vaccination was a holy thing, still (in the circumstances) vaccination was good enough. But they yet clung to principles for which Hampden died on the field, and Russell on the scaffold, and many of their own citizens in bed! There must be no Coercion. Everyone who liked must be allowed to have smallpox as much as he pleased. All other issues were unimportant except that of freedom!

'Here I rose—I was rather excited—and said that I hoped the reverend speaker was not deserting the sacred principle of compulsory temperance? Would the speaker allow people freedom to drink? All other issues were unimportant compared with that of freedom, except the interest of depriving a poor man of his beer. To catch smallpox was a Briton's birthright, but not to take a modest quencher. No freedom to drink! "Down with the drink!" I cried, and drained my tea-cup, and waved it, amidst ringing cheers. Mr. Truman admitted that there were exceptions—one exception, at least. Disease must be free to all, not alcohol nor Ritualism. He thanked his young friend the gifted lecturer for recalling him to his principles.

'The principles of the good old cause, the Puritan cause, were as pure as glycerinated lymph, and he proposed to found a Liberal Vaccinationist League. They are great people for leagues at Bulcester, and they like the initials L. V. L. There was no drinking of toasts, for there was nothing to drink them in, and—do you know, Mr. Merton?—I think it must be nearly luncheon time.'

'Champagne appears to me to be indicated,' said Merton, who rang the bell and then summoned Miss Blossom from her typewriting.

'We have done nothing,' Merton said, 'but heaven only knows what we have escaped in the adventure of the Lady Novelist and the Vaccinationist.'

On taking counsel's opinion, Merton learned, with a shudder, that if young Warren had used the Borgia ring, and if Jane had resented it, he might have been indicted for a common assault, under 24 and 25 Victoria, cap. 100, sec. 24, for 'unlawfully and maliciously administering a noxious thing with intent to annoy.'

'I don't think she could have proved the intent to annoy,' said the learned counsel.

'You don't know a Bulcester jury as it was before the epidemic,' said Merton. 'And I might have been an accessory before the fact, and, anyhow, we should all have got into the newspapers.'

Miss Martin was the most admired of the bridesmaids at the Warren-Truman marriage.



X. ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR AMERICAN

I. The Prize of a Lady's Hand

'Yes, I guess that Pappa was reckoned considerable of a crank. A great educational reformer, and a progressive Democratic stalwart, that is the kind of hair-pin Pappa was! But it is awkward for me, some.'

These remarks, though of an obsolete and exaggerated transatlantic idiom, were murmured in the softest of tones, in the most English of silken accents, by the most beautiful of young ladies. She occupied the client's chair in Merton's office, and, as she sat there and smiled, Merton acknowledged to himself that he had never met a client so charming and so perplexing.

Miss McCabe had been educated, as Merton knew, at an aristocratic Irish convent in Paris, a sanctuary of old names and old creeds. This was the plan of her late father (spoken of by her as Pappa), an educational reformer of eccentric ideas, who, though of ancient (indeed royal) Irish descent, was of American birth. The young lady had thus acquired abroad, much against her will, that kind of English accent which some of her countrywomen reckon 'affected.' But her intense patriotism had induced her to study, in the works of American humourists, and to reproduce in her discourse, the flowers of speech of which a specimen has been presented. The national accent was beyond her, but at least she could be true to what she (erroneously) believed to be the national idiom.

'Your case is peculiar,' said Merton thoughtfully, 'and scarcely within our province. As a rule our clients are the parents, guardians, or children of persons entangled in undesirable engagements. But you, I understand, are dissatisfied with the matrimonial conditions imposed by the will of the late Mr. McCabe?'

'I want to take my own pick out of the crowd—' said Miss McCabe.

'I can readily understand,' said Merton, bowing, 'that the throng of wooers is enormous,' and he vaguely thought of Penelope.

'The scheme will be popular. It will hit our people right where they live,' said Miss McCabe, not appropriating the compliment. 'You see Pappa struck ile early, and struck it often. He was what our Howells calls a "multimillionaire," and I'm his only daughter. Pappa loved me, but he loved the people better. Guess Pappa was not mean, not worth a cent. He was a white man!'

Miss McCabe, with a glow of lovely enthusiasm, contemplated the unprecedented whiteness of the paternal character.

'"What the people want," Pappa used to say, "is education. They want it short, and they want it striking." That was why he laid out five millions on his celebrated Museum of Freaks, with a staff of competent professors and lecturers. "The McCabe Museum of Natural Varieties, lectures and all, is open gratuitously to the citizens of our Republic, and to intelligent foreigners." That was how Pappa put it. I say that he dead-headed creation!'

'Truly Republican munificence,' said Merton, 'worthy of your great country.'

'Well, I should smile,' said Miss McCabe.

'But—excuse my insular ignorance—I do not exactly understand how a museum of freaks, admirably organised as no doubt it is, contributes to the cause of popular education.'

'You have museums even in London?' asked Miss McCabe.

Merton assented.

'Are they not educational?'

'The British Museum is mainly used by the children of the poor, as a place where they play a kind of subdued hide-and-seek,' said Merton.

'That's because they are not interested in tinned Egyptian corpses and broken Greek statuary ware,' answered the fair Republican. 'Now, Mr. Merton, did you ever see or hear of a popular museum, a museum that the People would give its cents to see?'

'I have heard of Mr. Barnum's museum,' said Merton.

'That's the idea: it is right there,' said Miss McCabe. 'But old man Barnum was not scientific. He saw what our people wanted, but he did not see, Pappa said, how to educate them through their natural instincts. Barnum's mermaid was not genuine business. It confused the popular mind, and fostered superstition—and got found out. The result was scepticism, both religious and scientific. Now, Pappa used to argue, the lives of our citizens are monotonous. They see yellow dogs, say, but each yellow dog has only one tail. They see men and women, but almost all of them have only one head: and even a hand with six fingers is not common. This is why the popular mind runs into grooves. This causes what they call "the dead level of democracy." Even our men of genius, Pappa allowed (for he was a very fair-minded man), do not go ahead of the European ticket, but rather the reverse. Your Tennyson has the inner tracks of our Longfellow: your Thackeray gives our Bertha Runkle his dust. The papers called Pappa unpatriotic, and a bad American. But he was not: he was a white man. When he saw his country's faults he put his finger on them, right there, and tried to cure them.'

'A noble policy,' murmured Merton.

Miss McCabe was really so pretty and unusual, that he did not care how long she was in coming to the point.

'Well, Pappa argued that there was more genius, or had been since the Declaration of Independence, even in England, than in the States. "And why?" he asked. "Why, because they have more variety in England. Things are not all on one level there—"'

'Our dogs have only one tail apiece,' said Merton, 'in spite of the proverb "as proud as a dog with two tails," and a plurality of heads is unusual even among British subjects.'

'Yes,' answered Miss McCabe, 'but you have varieties among yourselves. You have a King and a Queen; and your peerage is rich in differentiated species. A Baronet is not a Marquis, nor is a Duke an Earl.'

'He may be both,' said Merton, but Miss McCabe continued to expose the parental philosophy.

'Now Pappa would not hear of aristocratic distinctions in our country. He was a Hail Columbia man, on the Democratic ticket. But something is wanted, he said, to get us out of grooves, and break the monotony. That something, said Pappa, Nature has mercifully provided in Freaks. The citizens feel this, unconsciously: that's why they spend their money at Barnum's. But Barnum was not scientific, and Barnum was not straight about his mermaid. So Pappa founded his Museum of Natural Varieties, all of them honest Injun. Here the lecturers show off the freaks, and explain how Nature works them, and how she can always see them and go one better. We have the biggest gold nugget and the weeniest cunning least gold nugget; the biggest diamond and the smallest diamond; the tallest man and the smallest man; the whitest negro and the yellowest red man in the world. We have the most eccentric beasts, and the queerest fishes, and everything is explained by lecturers of world-wide reputation, on the principles of evolution, as copyrighted by our Asa Gray and our Agassiz. That is what Pappa called popular education, and it hits our citizens right where they live.'

Miss McCabe paused, in a flush of filial and patriotic enthusiasm. Merton inwardly thought that among the queerest fishes the late Mr. McCabe must have been pre-eminent. But what he said was, 'The scheme is most original. Our educationists (to employ a term which they do not disdain), such as Mr. Herbert Spencer, Sir Joshua Fitch, and others, have I thought out nothing like this. Our capitalists never endow education on this more than imperial scale.'

'Guess they are scaly varmints!' interposed Miss McCabe.

Merton bowed his acquiescence in the sentiment.

'But,' he went on, 'I still do not quite understand how your own prospects in life are affected by Mr. McCabe's most original and, I hope, promising experiment?'

'Pappa loved me, but he loved his country better, and taught me to adore her, and be ready for any sacrifice.' Miss McCabe looked straight at Merton, like an Iphigenia blended with a Joan of Arc.

'I do sincerely trust that no sacrifice is necessary,' said Merton. 'The circumstances do not call for so—unexampled a victim.'

'I am to be Lady Principal of the museum when I come to the age of twenty- five: that is, in six years,' said Miss McCabe proudly. 'You don't call that a sacrifice?'

Merton wanted to say that the most magnificent of natural varieties would only be in its proper place. But the man of business and the manager of a great and beneficent association overcame the mere amateur of beauty, and he only said that the position of Lady Principal was worthy of the ambition of a patriot, and a friend of the species.

'Well, I reckon! But a clause in Pappa's will is awkward for me, some. It is about my marriage,' said Miss McCabe bravely.

Merton assumed an air of grave interest.

'Pappa left it in his will that I was to marry the man (under the age of five-and-thirty, and of unimpeachable character and education) who should discover, and add to the museum, the most original and unheard-of natural variety, whether found in the Old or the New World.'

Merton could scarcely credit the report of his ears.

'Would you oblige me by repeating that statement?' he said, and Miss McCabe repeated it in identical terms, obviously quoting textually from the will.

'Now I understand your unhappy position,' said Merton, thoroughly agreeing with the transatlantic critics who had pronounced the late Mr. McCabe 'considerable of a crank.' 'But this is far too serious a matter for me—for our Association. I am no legist, but I am convinced that, at least British, and I doubt not American, law would promptly annul a testatory clause so utterly unreasonable and unprecedented.'

'Unreasonable!' exclaimed Miss McCabe, rising to her feet with eyes of flame, 'I am my father's daughter, and his wish is my law, whatever the laws that men make may say.'

Her affectation of slang had fallen off; she was absolutely natural now, and entirely in earnest.

Merton rose also.

'One moment,' he said. 'It would be impertinence in me to express my admiration of you—of what you say. As the question is not a legal one (in such I am no fit adviser) I shall think myself honoured if you will permit me to be of any service in the circumstances. They are less unprecedented than I hastily supposed. History records many examples of fathers, even of royal rank, who have attached similar conditions to the disposal of their daughters' hands.'

Merton was thinking of the kings in the treatises of Monsieur Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy, and other historians of Fairyland; of monarchs who give their daughters to the bold adventurers that bring the smallest dog, or the singing rose, or the horse magical.

'What you really want, I think,' he went on, as Miss McCabe resumed her seat, 'is to have your choice, as you said, among the competitors?'

'Yes,' replied the fair American, 'that is only natural.'

'But then,' said Merton, 'much depends on who decides as to the merits of the competitors. With whom does the decision rest?'

'With the people.'

'With the people?'

'Yes, with the popular vote, as expressed through the newspaper that my father founded—The Yellow Flag. The public is to see the exhibits, the new varieties of nature, and the majority of votes is to carry the day. "Trust the people!" that was Pappa's word.'

'Then anyone who chooses, of the age, character, and education stipulated under the clause in the will, may go and bring in whatever variety of nature he pleases and take his chance?'

'That is it all the time,' said the client. 'There is a trust, and the trustees, friends of Pappa's, decide on the qualifications of the young men who enter for the competition. If the trustees are satisfied they allot money for expenses out of the exploration fund, so that nobody may be stopped because he is poor.'

'There will be an enormous throng of competitors in these conditions—and with such a prize,' Merton could not help adding.

'I reckon the trustees are middling particular. They'll weed them out.'

'Is there any restriction on the nationality of the competitors?' asked Merton, on whom an idea was dawning.

'Only members of the English speaking races need apply,' said Miss McCabe. 'Pappa took no stock in Spaniards or Turks.'

'The voters will be prejudiced in favour of their own fellow citizens?' asked Merton. 'That is only natural.'

'Trust the people,' said Miss McCabe. 'The whole thing is to be kept as dark as a blind coloured person hunting in a dark cellar for a black cat that is not there.'

'A truly Miltonic illustration,' said Merton.

'The advertisement for competitors will be carefully worded, so as to attract only young men of science. The young men are not to be told about me: the prize is in dollars, "with other advantages to be later specified." The varieties found are to be conveyed to a port abroad, not yet named, and shipped for New York in a steamer belonging to the McCabe Trust.'

'Then am I to understand that the conditions affecting your marriage are still an entire secret?'

'That is so,' said Miss McCabe, 'and I guess from what the marchioness told me, your reference, that you can keep a secret.'

'To keep secrets is the very essential of my vocation,' said Merton.

But this secret, as will be seen, he did not absolutely keep.

'The arrangements,' he added, 'are most judicious.'

'Guess Pappa was 'cute,' said Miss McCabe, relapsing into her adopted mannerisms.

'I think I now understand the case in all its bearings,' Merton went on. 'I shall give it my serious consideration. Perhaps I had better say no more at present, but think over the matter. You remain in town for the season?'

'Guess we've staked out a claim in Berkeley Square,' said Miss McCabe, 'an agreeable location.' She mentioned the number of the house.

'Then we are likely to meet now and then,' said Merton, 'and I trust that I may be permitted to wait on you occasionally.'

Miss McCabe graciously assented; her chaperon, Lady Rathcoffey, was summoned by her from the inner chamber and the society of Miss Blossom, the typewriter; the pair drove away, and Merton was left to his own reflections.

'I do not know what can be done for her,' he thought, 'except to see that there is at least one eligible man, a gentleman, among the crowd of competitors, and that he is a likely man to win the beautiful prize. And that man is Bude, by Jove, if he wants to win it.'

The Earl of Bude, whose name at once occurred to Merton, was a remarkable personage. The world knew him as rich, handsome, happy, and a mighty hunter of big game. They knew not the mysterious grief that for years had gnawed at his heart. Why did not Bude marry? No woman could say. The world, moreover, knew not, but Merton did, that Lord Bude was the mysterious Mr. Jones Harvey, who contributed the most original papers to the Proceedings of the Geographical and Zoological Societies, and who had conferred many strange beasts on the Gardens of the latter learned institution. The erudite papers were read, the eccentric animals were conferred, in the name of Mr. Jones Harvey. They came from outlandish addresses in the ends of the earth, but, in the flesh, Jones Harvey had been seen by no man, and his secret had been confided to Merton only, to Logan, and two other school friends. He did good to science by stealth, and blushed at the idea of being a F.R.S. There was no show of science about Bude, and nothing exotic, except the singular circumstance that, however he happened to be dressed, he always wore a ring, or pin, or sleeve links set with very ugly and muddy looking pearls. From these ornaments Lord Bude was inseparable; to chaff about presents from dusky princesses on undiscovered shores he was impervious. Even Merton did not know the cause of his attachment to these ungainly jewels, or the dark memory of mysterious loss with which they were associated.

Merton's first care was to visit the divine Althaea, Mrs. Brown-Smith, and other ladies of his acquaintance. Their cards were deposited at the claim staked out by Miss McCabe in Berkeley Square, and that young lady soon 'went everywhere,' and publicly confessed that she 'was having a real lovely time.' By a little diplomacy Lord Bude was brought acquainted with Miss McCabe. She consented to overlook his possession of a coronet; titles were, to this heroine, not marvels (as to some of her countrywomen and ours), but rather matters of indifference, scarcely even suggesting hostile prejudice. The observers in society, mothers and maids, and the chroniclers of fashion, soon perceived that there was at least a marked camaraderie between the elegant aristocrat, hitherto indifferent to woman, untouched, as was deemed, by love, and the lovely Child of Freedom. Miss McCabe sat by him while he drove his coach; on the roof of his drag at Lord's; and of his houseboat at Henley, where she fainted when the crew of Johns Hopkins University, U. S., was defeated by a length by Balliol (where Lord Bude had been the favourite pupil of the great Master). Merton remarked these tokens of friendship with approval. If Bude could be induced to enter for the great competition, and if he proved successful, there seemed no reason to suppose that Miss McCabe would be dissatisfied with the People's choice.

Towards the end of the season, and in Bude's smoking-room, about five in the July morning after a ball at Eglintoun House, Merton opened his approaches. He began, cautiously, from talk of moors and forests; he touched on lochs, he mentioned the Highland traditions of water bulls (which haunt these meres); he spoke of the Beathach mor Loch Odha, a legendary animal of immeasurable length. The Beathach has twelve feet; he has often been heard crashing through the ice in the nights of winter. These tales the narrator has gleaned from the lips of the Celtic peasantry of Letter Awe.

'I daresay he does break the ice,' said Bude. 'In the matter of cryptic survivals of extinct species I can believe a good deal.'

'The sea serpent?' asked Merton.

'Seen him thrice,' said Bude.

'Then why did not Jones Harvey weigh in with a letter to Nature?'

'Jones Harvey has a scientific reputation to look after, and knows he would be laughed at. That's the kind of hair-pin he is,' said Bude, quoting Miss McCabe. 'By Jove, Merton, that girl—' and he paused.

'Yes, she is pretty,' said Merton.

'Pretty! I have seen the women of the round world—before I went to—well, never mind where, I used to think the Poles the most magnificent, but she—'

'Whips creation,' said Merton. 'But I,' he went on, 'am rather more interested in these other extraordinary animals. Do you seriously believe, with your experience, that some extinct species are—not extinct?'

'To be sure I do. The world is wide. But they are very shy. I once stalked a Bunyip, in Central Australia, in a lagoon. The natives said he was there: I watched for a week, squatting in the reeds, and in the grey of the seventh dawn I saw him.'

'Did you shoot?'

'No, I observed him through a field glass first.'

'What is the beggar like?'

'Much like some of the Highland water cattle, as described, but it is his ears they take for horns. Australia has no indigenous horned animal. He is, I should say, about nine feet long, marsupial (he rose breast high), and web-footed. I saw that when he dived. Other white men have seen him—Buckley, the convict, for one, when he lived among the blacks.'

'Buckley was not an accurate observer.'

'Jones Harvey is.'

'Any other queer beasts?'

'Of course, plenty. You have heard of the Mylodon, the gigantic Sloth? His bones, skin, and hair were lately found in a cave in Patagonia, with a lot of his fodder. You can see them at the British Museum in South Kensington. Primitive Patagonian man used the female of the species as a milch-cow. He was a genial friendly kind of brute, accessible to charm of manner and chopped hay. They fed him on that, in a domesticated state.'

'But he is extinct. Hesketh Pritchard went to look for a live Mylodon, and did not find him.'

'Did not know where to look,' said Bude.

'But you do?' asked Merton.

'Yes, I think so.'

'Then why don't you bring one over to the Zoo?'

'I may some day.'

'Are there any more survivors of extinct species?'

'Merton, is this an interview? Are you doing Mr. Jones Harvey at home for a picture paper?'

'No, I've dropped the Press,' said Merton, 'I ask in a spirit of scientific curiosity.'

'Well, there is the Dinornis, the Moa of New Zealand. A bird as big as the Roc in the "Arabian Nights."'

'Have you seen him?'

'No, but I have seen her, the hen bird. She was sitting on eggs. No man knows her nest but myself, and old Te-iki-pa, the chief medicine-man, or Tohunga, of the Maori King. The Moa's eyrie is in the King's country. It is a difficult country, and a dangerous business, if the cock Moa chances to come home.'

'Bude, is this worthy of an old friend, this blague?'

'Do you doubt my word?'

'If you give me your word I must believe—that you dreamed it.'

Then a strange thing happened.

Bude walked to a small case of instruments that stood on a table in the smoking-room. He unlocked it, took out a lancet, brought a Rhodian bowl from a shelf, and bared his arm.

'Do you want proof?'

'Proof that you saw a hen Moa sitting?' asked Merton in amazement.

'Not exactly, but proof that Te-iki-pa knew a thing or two, quite as out of the way as the habitat of the Moa.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'Bare your arm, and hold it over the bowl.'

The room was full of the yellow dusky light of an early summer morning in London. Outside the heavy carts were rolling by: in full civilisation the scene was strange.

'The Blood Covenant?' asked Merton.

Bude nodded.

Merton turned up his cuff, Bude let a little blood drop into the bowl, then performed the same operation on his own arm.

'This is all rot,' he said, 'but without this I cannot show you, by virtue of my oath to Te-iki-pa, what I mean to show you. Now repeat after me what I am going to say.'

He spoke a string of words, among which Merton, as he repeated them, could only recognise mana and atua. The vowel sounds were as in Italian.

'Now these words you must never report to any one, without my permission.'

'Not likely,' said Merton, 'I only remember two of them, and these I knew before.'

'All right,' said Bude.

He then veiled his face in a piece of silk that lay on a sofa, and rapidly, in a low voice, chanted a kind of hymn in a tongue unknown to Merton. All this he did with a bored air, as if he thought the performance a superfluous mummery.

'Now what shall I show you? Something simple. Look at the bookcase, and think of any book you may want to consult.'

Merton thought of the volume in M. of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The volume slowly slid from the shelf, glided through the air to Merton, and gently subsided on the table near him, open at the word Moa.

Merton walked across to the bookcase, took all the volumes from the shelf, and carefully examined the backs and sides for springs and mechanical advantages. There were none.

'Not half bad!' he said, when he had completed his investigation.

'You are satisfied that Te-iki-pa knew something? If you had seen what I have seen, if you had seen the three days dead—' and Bude shivered slightly.

'I have seen enough. Do you know how it is done?'

'No.'

'Well, a miracle is not what you call logical proof, but I believe that you did see the Moa, and a still more extraordinary bird, Te-iki-pa.'

'Yes, they talk of strange beasts, but "nothing is stranger than man." Did you ever hear of the Berbalangs of Cagayan Sulu?'

'Never in my life,' said Merton.

'Heaven preserve me from them,' said Bude, and he gently stroked the strange muddy pearls in the sleeve-links on his loose shirt-cuff. 'Angels and ministers of grace defend us,' he exclaimed, crossing himself (he was of the old faith), and he fell silent.

It was a moment of emotion. Six silvery strokes were sounded from a little clock on the chimney-piece. The hour of confidences had struck.

'Bude, you are serious about Miss McCabe?' asked Merton.

'I mean to put it to the touch at Goodwood.'

'No use!' said Merton.

Bude changed colour.

'Are you?'

'No,' interrupted Merton. 'But she is not free.'

'There is somebody in America? Nobody here, I think.'

'It is hardly that,' said Merton. 'Can you listen to rather a long story? I'll cut it as much as possible. You must remember that I am practically breaking my word of honour in telling you this. My honour is in your hands.'

'Fire away,' said Bude, pouring a bottle of Apollinaris water into a long tumbler, and drinking deep.

Merton told the tale of Miss McCabe's extraordinary involvement, and of the wild conditions on which her hand was to be won. 'And as to her heart, I think,' he added, 'if you pull off the prize—

If my heart by signs can tell, Lordling, I have marked her daily, And I think she loves thee well.'

'Thank you for that, old cock,' replied the peer, shaking Merton's hand. He had recovered from his emotion.

'I'm on,' he added, after a moment's silence, 'but I shall enter as Jones Harvey.'

'His name and his celebrated papers will impress the trustees,' said Merton. 'Now what variety of nature shall you go for? Wild men count. Shall you fetch a Berbalang of what do you call it?'

Bude shuddered. 'Not much,' he said. 'I think I shall fetch a Moa.'

'But no steamer could hold that gigantic denizen of the forests.'

'You leave that to Jones Harvey. Jones is 'cute, some,' he said, reminiscent of the adored one, and he fell into a lover's reverie.

He was aroused by Merton's departure: he finished the Apollinaris water, took a bath, and went to bed.



II. The Adventure of the Muddy Pearls

The Earl of Bude had meant to lay his heart, coronet, and other possessions, real and personal, before the tiny feet of the fair American at Goodwood. But when he learned from Merton the involvements of this heiress and paragon, that her hand depended on the choice of the people, that the choice of the people was to settle on the adventurer who brought to New York the rarest of nature's varieties, the earl honourably held his peace. Yet he and the object of his love were constantly meeting, on the yachts and in the country houses of their friends, the aristocracy, and, finally, at shooting lodges in the Highlands. Their position, as the Latin Delectus says concerning the passion of love in general, was 'a strange thing, and full of anxious fears.' Bude could not declare himself, and Miss McCabe, not knowing that he knew her situation, was constantly wondering why he did not speak. Between fear of letting her secret show itself in a glance or a blush and hope of listening to the words which she desired to hear, even though she could not answer them as her heart prompted, she was unhappy. Bude could not resist the temptation to be with her—indeed he argued to himself that, as her suitor and an adventurer about to risk himself in her cause, he had a right to be near her. Meanwhile Merton was the confidant of both of the perplexed lovers; at least Miss McCabe (who, of course, told him nothing about Bude) kept him apprised as to the conduct of her trustees.

They had acted with honourable caution and circumspection. Their advertisements guardedly appealed to men of daring and of scientific distinction under the age of thirty-five. A professorship might have been in view for all that the world could see, if the world read the advertisements. Perhaps it was something connected with the manufacture of original explosives, for daring is not usually required in the learned. The testimonials and printed works of applicants were jealously scrutinised. At personal interviews with competitors similar caution was observed. During three weeks in August the papers announced that Lord Bude was visiting the States; arrangements about a yachting match in the future were his pretence. He returned, he came to Scotland, and it was in a woodland path beside the Lochy that his resolution failed, and that he spoke to Miss McCabe. They were walking home together from the river in the melancholy and beautiful close of a Highland day in September. Behind them the gillies, at a respectful distance, were carrying the rods and the fish. The wet woods were fragrant, the voice of the stream was deepening, strange lights came and went on moor and hills and the distant loch. It was then that Bude opened his heart. He first candidly explained that his heart, he had supposed, was dead—buried on a distant and a deadly shore.

'I reckon there's a lost Lenore most times,' Miss McCabe had replied to this confession.

But, though never to be forgotten, the memory of the lost one, Bude averred, was now merged in the light of a living love; his heart was no longer tenanted only by a shadow.

The heart of Miss McCabe stood still for a moment, her cheek paled, but the gallant girl was true to herself, to her father's wish, to her native land, to the flag. She understood her adorer.

'Guess I'm bespoke,' said Miss McCabe abruptly.

'You are another's! Oh, despair!' exclaimed the impassioned earl.

'Yes, I reckon I'm the Bride of Seven, like the girl in the poem.'

'The Bride of Seven?' said Bude.

'One out of that crowd will call me his,' said Miss McCabe, handing to her adorer the list, which she had received by mail a day or two earlier, of the accepted competitors. He glanced over the names.

1. Dr. Hiram P. Dodge, of the Smithsonian Institute.

2. Alfred Jenkins, F.R.S., All Souls College, Oxford.

3. Dr. James Rustler, Columbia University.

4. Howard Fry, M.A., Ph.D., Trinity College, Cambridge.

5. Professor Potter, F.R.S., University of St. Andrews.

6. Professor Wilkinson, University of Harvard.

7. Jones Harvey, F.G.S., London, England.

'In Heaven's name,' asked the earl, 'what means this mystification? Miss McCabe, Melissa, do not trifle with me. Is this part of the great American Joke? You are playing it pretty low down on me, Melissa!' he ended, the phrase being one of those with which she had made him familiar.

She laughed hysterically: 'It's honest Injun,' she said, and in the briefest terms she told him (what he knew very well) the conditions on which her future depended.

'They are a respectable crowd, I don't deny it,' she went on, 'but, oh, how dull! That Mr. Jenkins, I saw him at your Commemoration. He gave us luncheon, and showed us dry old bones of beasts and savage notions at the Museum. I druther have been on the creek,' by which name she intended the classical river Isis.

'Dr. Hiram P. Dodge is one of our rising scientists, a boss of the Smithsonian Institute. Well, Washington is a finer location than Oxford! Dr. Rustler is a crank; he thinks he can find a tall talk mummy that speaks an unknown tongue.'

'A Toltec mummy? Ah,' said Bude, 'I know where to find one of them.'

'Find it then, Alured!' exclaimed Miss McCabe, blushing scarlet and turning aside. 'But you are not on the list. You are an idler, and not scientific, not worth a red cent. There, I've given myself away!' She wept.

They were alone, beneath the walls of a crumbling fortalice of Lochiel. The new risen moon saw Bude embrace her and dry her tears. A nameless blissful hope awakened in the fair American; help there must be, she thought, with these strong arms around her.

She rapidly disposed of the remaining names: of Howard Fry, who had a red beard; of Professor Potter of St. Andrews, whose accent was Caledonian; of Wilkinson, an ardent but unalluring scientist. 'As for Jones Harvey,' she said, 'I've canvassed everywhere, and I can't find anybody that ever saw him. I am more afraid of him than of all the other galoots; I don't know why.'

'He is reckoned very learned,' said Bude, 'and has not been thought ill- looking.'

'Do tell!' said Miss McCabe.

'Oh, Melissa, can you even dream of another in an hour like this?'

'Did you ever see Jones Harvey?'

'Yes, I have met him.'

'Do you know him well?'

'No man knows him better.'

'Can't you get him to stand out, and, Alured, can't you—fetch along that old tall talk mummy? He would hit our people, being American himself.'

'It is impossible. Jones Harvey will never stand out,' and Bude smiled.

By the telepathy of the affections Miss McCabe was slowly informed, especially as Bude's smile widened almost unbecomingly, while he gazed into the deeps of her golden eyes.

'Alured,' she exclaimed, 'that's why you went to the States. You—are—Jones Harvey!'

'Secret for secret,' whispered the earl. 'We have both given ourselves away. Unknown to the world I am Jones Harvey; to live for you: to love you: to dare; if need be, to die for you.'

'Well, you surprise me!' said Miss McCabe.

* * * * *

The narrator is unwilling to dilate on the delights of a privileged affection. In this love affair neither of the lovers could feel absolutely certain that their affection was privileged. The fair American had her own secret scheme if her hopes were blighted. She could not then obey the paternal will: she would retire into the life religious, and, as Sister Anna, would strive to forget the sorrows of Melissa McCabe. Bude had his own hours of gloom.

'It is a six-to-one chance,' he said to Merton when they met.

'Better than that, I think,' said Merton. 'First, you know exactly what you are entered for. Do the others? When you saw the trustees in the States, did they tell you about the prize?'

'Not they. They spoke of a pecuniary reward which would be eminently satisfactory, and of the opportunity for research and distinction, and all expenses found. I said that I preferred to pay my own way, which surprised and pleased them a good deal.'

'Well, then, knowing the facts, and the lady, you have a far stronger motive than the other six.'

'That's true,' said Bude.

'Again, though the others are good men (not that I like Jenkins of All Souls), none of them has your experience and knowledge. Jones Harvey's testimonials would carry it if it were a question of election to a professorship.'

'You flatter me,' answered Bude.

'Lastly, did the trustees ask you if you were a married man?'

'No, by Jove, they didn't.'

'Well, nothing about the competitors being unmarried men occurs in the clause of McCabe's last will and testament. He took it for granted, the prize being what it is, that only bachelors were eligible. But he forgot to say so, in so many words, and the trustees did not go beyond the deed. Now, Dodge is married; Fry of Trinity is a married don; Rustler (I happen to know) is an engaged man, who can't afford to marry a charming girl in Detroit, Michigan; and Professor Potter has buried one wife, and wedded another. If Rustler is loyal to his plighted word, you have nobody against you but Wilkinson and old Jenkins of All Souls—a tough customer, I admit, though what a Stinks man like him has to do at All Souls I don't know.'

'I say, this is hard on the other sportsmen! What ought I to do? Should I tell them?'

'You can't: you have no official knowledge of their existence. You only know through Miss McCabe. You have just to sit tight.'

'It seems beastly unsportsmanlike,' said Bude.

'Wills are often most carelessly drafted,' answered Merton, 'and the usual consequences follow.'

'It is not cricket,' said Bude, and really he seemed much more depressed than elated by the reduction of the odds against him from 6 to 1 to 2 to 1.

This is the magnificent type of character produced by our British system of athletic sports, though it is not to be doubted that the spirit of Science, in the American gentlemen, would have been equally productive of the sense of fair play.

* * * * * *

A year, by the terms of McCabe's will, was allotted to the quest. Candidates were to keep the trustees informed as to their whereabouts. Six weeks before the end of the period the competitors would be instructed as to the port of rendezvous, where an ocean liner, chartered by the trustees, was to await them. Bude, as Jones Harvey, had obtained leave to sail his own steam yacht of 800 tons.

The earl's preparations were simple. He carried his usual stock of scientific implements, his usual armament, including two Maxim guns, and a package of considerable size and weight, which was stored in the hold. As to the preparations of the others he knew nothing, but Miss McCabe became aware that Rustler had not left the American continent. Concerning Jenkins, and the probable aim of his enterprise, the object of his quest, she gleaned information from a junior Fellow of All Souls, who was her slave, was indiscreet, and did not know how deeply concerned she was in the expeditions. But she never whispered a word of what she knew to her lover, not even in the hour of parting.

It was in an unnamed creek of the New Zealand coast, six weeks before the end of the appointed year, that Bude received a telegram in cipher from the trustees. Bearded, and in blue spectacles, clad rudely as a mariner, Bude was to all, except Logan, who had accompanied him, plain Jones Harvey. None could have recognised in his rugged aspect the elegant aristocrat of Mayfair.

Bude took the message from the hands of the Maori bearer. As he deciphered it his fingers trembled with eagerness. 'Oh, Heaven! Here is the Hand of Destiny!' he exclaimed, when he had read the message; and with pallid face he dropped into a deck-chair.

'No bad news?' asked Logan with anxiety.

'The port of rendezvous,' said Bude, much agitated. 'Come down to my cabin.'

Entering the sumptuous cabin, Bude opened the locked door of a state-room, and uttered some words in an unknown tongue. A tall and very ancient Maori, tatooed with the native 'Moka' on every inch of his body, emerged. The snows of some eighty winters covered his broad breast and majestic head. His eyes were full of the secrets of primitive races. For clothing he wore two navy revolvers stuck in a waist-cloth.

'Te-iki-pa,' said Bude, in the Maori language, 'watch by the door, we must have no listeners, and your ears are keen as those of the youngest Rangatira' (warrior).

The august savage nodded, and, lying down on the floor, applied his ear to the chink at its foot.

'The port of tryst,' whispered Bude to Logan, as they seated themselves at the remotest extremity of the cabin, 'is in Cagayan Sulu.'

'And where may that be?' asked Logan, lighting a cigarette.

'It is a small volcanic island, the most southerly of the Philippines.'

'American territory now,' said Logan. 'But what about it? If it was anybody but you, Bude, I should say he was in a funk.'

'I am in a funk,' answered Bude simply.

'Why?'

'I have been there before and left—a blood-feud.'

'What of it? We have one here, with the Maori King, about you know what. Have we not the Maxims, and any quantity of Lee-Metfords? Besides, you need not go ashore at Cagayan Sulu.'

'But they can come aboard. Bullets won't stop them.'

'Stop whom? The natives?'

'The Berbalangs: you might as well try to stop mosquitoes with Maxims.'

'Who are the Berbalangs then?'

Bude paced the cabin in haggard anxiety. 'Least said, soonest mended,' he muttered.

'Well, I don't want your confidence,' said Logan, hurt.

'My dear fellow,' said Bude affectionately, 'you are likely to know soon enough. In the meantime, please accept this.'

He opened a strong box, which appeared to contain jewellery, and offered Logan a ring. Between two diamonds of the finest water it contained a bizarre muddy coloured pearl. 'Never let that leave your finger,' said Bude. 'Your life may hang on it.'

'It is a pretty talisman,' said Logan, placing the jewel on the little finger of his right hand. 'A token of some friendly chief, I suppose, at Cagayan—what do you call it?'

'Let us put it at that,' answered Bude; 'I must take other precautions.'

It seemed to Logan that these consisted in making similar presents to the officers and crew, all of whom were Englishmen. Te-iki-pa displaced his nose-ring and inserted his pearl in the orifice previously occupied by that ornament. A little chain of the pearls was hung on the padlock of the huge packing-case, which was the special care of Te-iki-pa.

'Luckily I had the yacht's painting altered before leaving England,' said Bude. 'I'll sail her under Spanish colours, and perhaps they won't spot her. Any way, with the pearls—lucky I bought a lot—we ought to be safe enough. But if any one of the competitors has gone for specimens of the Berbalangs, I fear, I sadly fear, the consequences.' His face clouded; he fell into a reverie.

Logan made no reply, but puffed rings of cigarette smoke into the still blue air. There was method in Bude's apparent madness, but Logan suspected that there was madness in his method.

A certain coolness had not ceased to exist between the friends when, after their long voyage, they sighted the volcanic craters of the lonely isle of Cagayan Sulu and beheld the Stars and Stripes waving from the masthead of the George Washington (Captain Noah P. Funkal).

Logan landed, and noted the harmless but well-armed half-Mahometan natives of the village. He saw the other competitors, whose 'exhibits,' as Miss McCabe called them, were securely stored in the George Washington—strange spoils of far-off mysterious forests, and unplumbed waters of the remotest isles. Occasionally a barbaric yap, or a weird yell or hoot, was wafted on the air at feeding time. Jenkins of All Souls (whom he knew a little) Logan did not meet on the beach; he, like Bude, tarried aboard ship. The other adventurers were civil but remote, and there was a jealous air of suspicion on every face save that of Professor Potter. He, during the day of waiting on the island, played golf with Logan over links which he had hastily improvised. Beyond admitting, as they played, that his treasure was in a tank, 'and as well as could be expected, poor brute, but awful noisy,' Professor Potter offered no information.

'Our find is quiet enough,' said Logan.

'Does he give you trouble about food?' asked Mr. Potter.

'Takes nothing,' said Logan, adding, as he holed out, 'that makes me dormy two.'

From the rest of the competitors not even this amount of information could be extracted, and as for Captain Noah Funkal, he was taciturn, authoritative, and, Logan thought, not in a very good temper.

The George Washington and the Pendragon (so Jones Harvey had christened the yacht which under Bude's colours sailed as The Sabrina) weighed anchor simultaneously. If possible they were not to lose sight of each other, and they corresponded by signals and through the megalophone.

The hours of daylight on the first day of the return voyage passed peacefully at deck-cricket, as far as Logan, Bude, and such of the officers and men as could be spared were concerned. At last night came 'at one stride,' and the vast ocean plain was only illuminated by the pale claritude that falls from the stars. Logan and Bude (they had not dressed for dinner, but wore yachting suits) were smoking on deck, when, quite suddenly, a loud, almost musical, roar or hum was heard from the direction of the distant island.

'What's that?' asked Logan, leaping up and looking towards Cagayan Sulu.

'The Berbalangs,' said Bude coolly. 'You are wearing the ring I gave you?'

'Yes, always do,' said Logan, looking at his hand.

'All the men have their pearls; I saw to that,' said Bude.

'Why, the noise is dwindling,' said Logan. 'That is odd; it seemed to be coming this way.'

'So it is,' said Bude; 'the nearer they approach the less you hear them. When they have come on board you won't hear them at all.'

Logan stared, but asked no more questions.

The musical boom as it approached had died to a whisper, and then had fallen into perfect silence. At the very moment when the mysterious sound ceased, a swarm of things like red fire-flies, a host of floating specks of ruby light, invaded the deck in a cluster. The red points then scattered, approached each man on board, and paused when within a yard of his head or breast. Then they vanished. A queer kind of chill ran down Logan's spine; then the faint whispered musical moan tingled in each man's ears, and the sounds as they departed eastwards gathered volume and force till, in a moment, there fell perfect stillness.

Stillness, broken only by a sudden and mysterious chorus of animal cries from the George Washington. A kind of wail, high, shrieking, strenuous, ending in a noise as of air escaping from a pipe; a torrent of barks such as no known beast could utter, subsiding into moans that chilled the blood; a guttural scream, broken by heavy sounds as if of water lapping on a rock at uncertain intervals; a human cry, human words, with unfamiliar vowel sounds, soon slipping into quiet—these were among the horrors that assailed the ears of the voyagers in the Pendragon. Such a discord of laments has not tingled to the indifferent stars since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, and the Mammoth.

'What a row in the menagerie!' said Logan.

He was not answered.

Bude had fallen into a deck-chair, his face buried in his hands, his arms rocking convulsively.

'I say, old cock, pull yourself together,' said Logan, and rushing down the companion stairs, he reappeared with a bottle of champagne. To extract the cork (how familiar, how reassuring, sounded the cloop!), and to pour the foaming beverage into two long tumblers, was, to the active Logan, the work of a moment. Shaking Bude, he offered him the beaker; the earl drained it at a draught. He shuddered, but rose to his feet.

'Not a man alive on that doomed vessel,' he was saying, when anew the still air was rent by the raucous notes of a megalophone:

'Is your exhibit all right?'

'Fit as a fiddle,' answered Logan through a similar instrument.

'Our exhibits are gone bust,' answered Captain Noah Funkal. 'Our professors are in fits. Our darkeys are all dead. Can your skipper come aboard?'

'Just launching a boat,' cried Logan.

Bude gave the necessary orders. His captain stepped up to him and saluted.

'Do you know what these red fire-flies were that come aboard, sir?' he asked.

'Fire-flies? Oh, musae volitantes sonorae, a common phenomenon in these latitudes,' answered Bude.

Logan rejoiced to see that the earl was himself again.

'The other gentlemen's scientific beasts don't seem to like them, sir?'

'So Captain Funkal seems to imply,' said Bude, and, taking the ropes, with Logan beside him, while the Pendragon lay to, he steered the boat towards the George Washington.

The captain welcomed them on deck in a scene of unusual character. He himself had a revolver in one hand, and a belaying pin in the other; he had been quelling, by the tranquillising methods of Captain Kettle, a mutiny caused by the terror of the crew. The sailors had attempted to leap overboard in the alarm caused by the invasion of the Berbalangs.

'You will excuse my friend and myself for not being in evening dress, during a visit at this hour,' said Bude in the silkiest of tones.

'Glad to see you shipshape, gentlemen,' answered the American mariner. 'My dudes of professors were prancing round in Tuxedos and Prince Alberts when the darned fire-flies came aboard.'

Bude bowed. Study of Miss McCabe had taught him that Tuxedos and Prince Alberts mean evening dress and frock-coats.

'Did your men have fits?' asked the captain.

'My captain, Captain Hardy, made a scientific inquiry about the—insects,' said Bude. 'The crew showed no emotion.'

'I guess our fire-bugs were more on business than yours,' said Captain Funkal; 'they've wrecked the exhibits, and killed the darkeys with fright: except two, and they were exhibits themselves. Will you honour me by stepping into my cabin, gentlemen. I am glad to see sane white men to-night.'

Bude and Logan followed him through a scene of melancholy interest. Beside the mast, within a shattered palisade, lay huddled the vast corpse of the Mylodon of Patagonia, couchant amidst his fodder of chopped hay. The expression of the huge animal was placid and urbane in death. He was the victim of the ceaseless curiosity of science. Two of the five-horned antelope giraffes of Central Africa lay in a confused heap of horns and hoofs. Beside an immense tank couched a figure in evening dress, swearing in a subdued tone. Logan recognised Professor Potter. He gently laid his hand on the Professor's shoulder. The Scottish savant looked up:

'It is a dommed mismanaged affair,' he said. 'I could have brought the poor beast safe enough from the Clyde to New York, but the Americans made me harl him round by yon island of camstairy deevils,' and he shook his fist in the direction of Cagayan Sulu.

'What had you got?' asked Logan.

'The Beathach na Loch na bheiste,' said Potter. 'I drained the Loch to get him. Fortunately,' he added, 'it was at the expense of the Trust.'

After a few words of commonplace but heartfelt condolence, Logan descended the companion, and followed Bude and Captain Funkal into the cabin of that officer. The captain placed refreshments on the table.

'Now, gentlemen,' he said, 'you have seen the least riled of my professors, and you can guess what the rest are like. Professor Rustler is weeping in his cabin over a shrivelled old mummy. "Never will he speak again," says he, and I am bound to say that I hev heard the critter discourse once. The mummy let some awful yells out of him when the fire-bugs came aboard.'

'Yes, we heard a human cry,' said Bude.

'I had thought the talk was managed with a concealed gramophone,' said the captain, 'but it wasn't. The Bunyip from Central Australia has gone to his long home. That was Professor Wilkinson's pet. There is nothing left alive out of the lot but the natives that Professor Jenkins of England brought in irons from Cagayan Sulu. I reckon them two niggers are somehow at the bottom of the whole ruction.'

'Indeed, and why?' asked Bude.

'Why, sir—I am addressing Professor Jones Harvey?'

Bude bowed. 'Harvey, captain, but not professor—simple amateur seaman and explorer.'

'Sir, your hand,' said the captain. 'Your friend is not a professor?'

'Not I,' said Logan, smiling.

The captain solemnly shook hands. 'Gentlemen, you have sand,' he said, a supreme tribute of respect. 'Well, about these two natives. I never liked taking them aboard. They are, in consequence of the triumph of our arms, American subjects, natives of the conquered Philippines. I am no lawyer, and they may be citizens, they may have votes. They are entitled, anyway, to the protection of the Flag, and I would have entered them as steerage passengers. But that Professor Jenkins (and the other professors agreed) would have it that they came under the head of scientific exhibits. And they did allow that the critters were highly dangerous. I guess they were right.'

'Why, what could they do?'

'Well, gentlemen, I heard stories on shore that I took no stock in. I am not a superstitious man, but they allowed that these darkeys are not of a common tribe, but what the papers call "highly developed mediums." And I guess they are at the bottom of the stramash.'

'Captain Funkal, may I be frank with you?' asked Bude.

'I am hearing you,' said the captain.

'Then, to put it shortly, I have been at Cagayan Sulu before, on an exploring cruise. That was in 1897. I never wanted to go back to it. Logan, did I not regret the choice of that port when the news reached us in New Zealand?'

Logan nodded. 'You funked it,' he said.

'When I was at Cagayan Sulu in 1897 I heard from the natives of a singular tribe in the centre of the island. This tribe is the Berbalangs.'

'That's what Professor Jenkins called them,' said the captain.

'The Berbalangs are subject to neither of the chiefs in the island. No native will approach their village. They are cannibals. The story is that they can throw themselves into a kind of trance. They then project a something or other—spirit, astral body, influence of some kind—which flies forth, making a loud noise when distant.'

'That's what we heard,' said the captain.

'But is silent when they are close at hand.'

'Silent they were,' said the captain.

'They then appear as points of red flame.'

'That's so,' interrupted the captain.

'And cause death to man and beast, apparently by terror. I have seen,' said Bude, shuddering, 'the face of a dead native of high respectability, into whose house, before my own eyes, these points of flame had entered. I had to force the door, it was strongly barred within. I never mentioned the fact before, knowing that I could not expect belief.'

'Well, sir, I believe you. You are a white man.'

Bude bowed, and went on. 'The circumstances, though not generally known, have been published, captain, by a gentleman of reputation, Mr. Edward Forbes Skertchley, of Hong Kong. His paper indeed, in the Journal of a learned association, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, {232}induced me, most unfortunately, to visit Cagayan Sulu, when it was still nominally in the possession of the Spaniards. My experience was similar to that of Mr. Skertchley, but, for personal reasons, was much more awful and distressing. One of the most beautiful of the island girls, a person of most amiable and winning character, not, alas! of my own faith'—Bude's voice broke—'was one of the victims of the Berbalangs. . . . I loved her.'

He paused, and covered his face with his hands. The others respected and shared his emotion. The captain, like all sailors, sympathetic, dashed away a tear.

'One thing I ought to add,' said Bude, recovering himself, 'I am no more superstitious than you are, Captain Funkal, and doubtless science will find a simple, satisfactory, and normal explanation of the facts, the existence of which we are both compelled to admit. I have heard of no well authenticated instance in which the force, whatever it is, has been fatal to Europeans. The superstitious natives, much as they dread the Berbalangs, believe that they will not attack a person who wears a cocoa- nut pearl. Why this should be so, if so it is, I cannot guess. But, as it is always well to be on the safe side, I provided myself five years ago with a collection of these objects, and when I heard that we were ordered to Cagayan Sulu I distributed them among my crew. My friend, you may observe, wears one of the pearls. I have several about my person.' He disengaged a pin from his necktie, a muddy pearl set with burning rubies. 'Perhaps, Captain Funkal, you will honour me by accepting this specimen, and wearing it while we are in these latitudes? If it does no good, it can do no harm. We, at least, have not been molested, though we witnessed the phenomena.'

'Sir,' said the captain, 'I appreciate your kindness, and I value your gift as a memorial of one of the most singular experiences in a seafaring life. I drink your health and your friend's. Mr. Logan, to you.' The captain pledged his guests.

'And now, gentlemen, what am I to do?'

'That, captain, is for your own consideration.'

'I'll carpet that lubber, Jenkins,' said the captain, and leaving the cabin, he returned with the Fellow of All Souls. His shirt front was ruffled, his white neckcloth awry, his pallid countenance betrayed a sensitive second-rate mind, not at unity with itself. He nodded sullenly to Logan: Bude he did not know.

'Professor Jenkins, Mr. Jones Harvey,' said the captain. 'Sit down, sir. Take a drink; you seem to need one.' Jenkins drained the tumbler, and sat with downcast eyes, his finger drumming nervously on the table.

'Professor Jenkins, sir, I reckon you are the cause of the unparalleled disaster to this exploring expedition. Why did you bring these two natives of our territory on board, you well and duly knowing that the end would not justify the proceedings?' A furtive glance from Jenkins lighted on the diamonds that sparkled in Logan's ring. He caught Logan's hand.

'Traitor!' he cried. 'What will not scientific jealousy dare, that meanest of the passions!'

'What the devil do you mean?' said Logan angrily, wrenching his hand away.

'You leave Mr. Logan alone, sir,' said the captain. 'I have two minds to put you in irons, Mr. Professor Jenkins. If you please, explain yourself.'

'I denounce this man and his companion,' said Jenkins, noticing a pearl ring on Bude's finger; 'I denounce them of conspiracy, mean conspiracy, against this expedition, and against the American flag.'

'As how?' inquired the captain, lighting a cigar with irritating calmness.

'They wear these pearls, in which I had trusted for absolute security against the Berbalangs.'

'Well, I wear one too,' said the captain, pointing to the pin in his necktie. 'Are you going to tell me that I am a traitor to the flag, sir? I warn you Professor, to be careful.'

'What am I to think?' asked Jenkins.

'It is rather more important what you say,' replied the captain. 'What is this fine conspiracy?'

'I had read in England about the Berbalangs.'

'Probably in Mr. Skertchley's curious paper in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal?' asked Bude with suavity.

Jenkins merely stared at him.

'I deemed that specimens of these American subjects, dowered with their strange and baneful gift, were well worthy of the study of American savants; and I knew that the pearls were a certain prophylactic.'

'What's that?' asked the captain.

'A kind of Universal Pain-Killer,' said Jenkins.

'Well, you surprise me,' said the captain, 'a man of your education. Pain- Killer!' and he expectorated dexterously.

'I mean that the pearls keep off the Berbalangs,' said Jenkins.

'Then why didn't you lay in a stock of the pearls?' asked the captain.

'Because these conspirators had been before me. These men, or their agents, had bought up, just before our arrival, every pearl in the island. They had wormed out my secret, knew the object of my adventure, knew how to ruin us all, and I denounce them.'

'A corner in pearls. Well, it was darned 'cute,' said the captain impartially. 'Now, Mr. Jones Harvey, and Mr. Logan, sir, what have you to say?'

'Did Mr. Jenkins—I think you said that this gentleman's name is Jenkins?—see the agent engaged in making this corner in pearls, or learn his name?' asked Bude.

'He was an Irish American, one McCarthy,' answered Jenkins sullenly.

'I am unacquainted with the gentleman,' said Bude, 'and I never employed any one for any such purpose. My visit to Cagayan Sulu was some years ago, just after that of Mr. Skertchley. Captain Funkal, I have already acquainted you with the facts, and you were kind enough to say that you accepted my statement.'

'I did, sir, and I do,' answered the captain. 'As for you,' he went on, 'Mr. Professor Jenkins, when you found that your game was dangerous, indeed likely to be ruinous, to this scientific expedition, and to the crew of the George Washington—damn you, sir—you should have dropped it. I don't know that I ever swore at a passenger before, and I beg your pardon, you two English gentlemen, for so far forgetting myself. I don't know, and these gentlemen don't know, who made the corner, but I don't think our citizens want either you or your exhibits. The whole population of the States, sir, not to mention the live stock, cannot afford to go about wearing cocoa-nut pearls, a precaution which would be necessary if I landed these venomous Berbalangs of yours on our shores: man and wife too, likely to have a family of young Berbalangs. Snakes are not a patch on these darkeys, and our coloured population, at least, would be busted up.'

The captain paused, perhaps attracted by the chance of thus solving the negro problem.

'So, I'll tell you what it is, gentlemen; and, Professor Jenkins, I'll turn back and land these two native exhibits, and I'll put you on shore, Professor Jenkins, at Cagayan Sulu. Perhaps before a steamer touches there—which is not once in a blue moon—you'll have had time to write an exhaustive monograph on the Berbalangs, their manners and customs.'

Jenkins (who knew what awaited him) threw himself on the floor at the feet of Captain Funkal. Horrified by the abject distress of one who, after all, was their countryman, Bude and Logan induced the captain to seclude Jenkins in his cabin. They then, by their combined entreaties, prevailed on the officer to land the Berbalangs on their own island, indeed, but to drop Jenkins later on civilised shores. Dawn saw the George Washington and the Pendragon in the port of Cagayan Sulu, where the fetters of the two natives, ill looking people enough, were knocked off, and they themselves deposited on the quay, where, not being popular, they were received by a hostile demonstration. The two vessels then resumed their eastward course. The taxidermic appliances without which Jones Harvey never sailed, and the services of his staff of taxidermists, were placed at the disposal of his brother savants. By this means a stuffed Mylodon, a stuffed Beathach, stuffed five-horned antelopes and a stuffed Bunyip, with a common gorilla and the Toltec mummy, now forever silent, were passed through the New York Custom House, and consigned to the McCabe Museum of Natural Varieties.

The immense case that contained the discovery of Jones Harvey was also carefully conveyed to an apartment prepared for it in the same repository. The competitors sought their hotels, Te-iki-pa marching beside Logan and Jones Harvey. But, by special arrangement, either Jones Harvey or his Maori ally always slept beside their mysterious case, which they watched with passionate attention. Two or three days were spent in setting up the stuffed exhibits. Then the trustees, through The Yellow Flag (the paper founded by the late Mr. McCabe), announced to the startled citizens the nature of the competition. On successive days the vast theatre of the McCabe Museum would be open, and each competitor, in turn, would display to the public his contribution, and lecture on his adventures and on the variety of nature which he had secured.

While the death of the animals was deplored, nothing was said, for obvious reasons, about the causes of the catastrophe.

The general excitement was intense. Interviewers scoured the city, and flocked, to little purpose, around the officials of the McCabe Museum. Special trains were run from all quarters. The hotels were thronged. 'America,' it was announced, 'had taken hold of science, and was just going to make science hum.'

On the first day of the exhibition, Dr. Hiram Dodge displayed the stuffed Mylodon. The agitation was unprecedented. America had bred, in ancient days, and an American citizen had discovered, the monstrous yet amiable animal whence prehistoric Patagonia drew her milk supplies and cheese stuffs. Mr. Dodge's adventures, he modestly said, could only be adequately narrated by Mr. Rider Haggard. Unluckily the Mylodon had not survived the conditions of the voyage, the change of climates. The applause was thunderous. Mr. Dodge gracefully expressed his obligations to his fair and friendly rival, Mr. Jones Harvey, who had loaned his taxidermic appliances. It did not appear to the public that the Mylodon could be excelled in interest. The Toltec mummy, as he could no longer talk, was flat on a falling market, nor was Mr. Rustler's narrative of its conversational powers accepted by the scepticism of the populace, though it was corroborated by Captain Funkal, Professor Dodge, and Professor Wilkinson, who swore affidavits before a notary, within the hearing of the multitude. The Beathach, exhibited by Professor Potter, was reckoned of high anatomical interest by scientific characters, but it was not of American habitat, and left the people relatively cold. On the other hand, all the Macleans and Macdonnells of Canada and Nova Scotia wept tears of joy at the corroboration of their tribal legends, and the popularity of Professor Potter rivalled even that of Mr. Ian Maclaren. He was at once engaged by Major Pond for a series of lectures. The adventures of Howard Fry, in the taking of his gorilla, were reckoned interesting, as were those of the captor of the Bunyip, but both animals were now undeniably dead. The people could not feed them with waffles and hominy cakes in the gardens of the institute. The savants wrangled on the anatomical differences and resemblances of the Bunyip and the Beathach; still the critters were, to the general mind, only stuffed specimens, though unique. The African five-horned brutes (though in quieter times they would have scored a triumph) did not now appeal to the heart of the people.

At last came the day when, in the huge crowded amphitheatre, with Te-iki- pa by his side, Jones Harvey addressed the congregation. First he exhibited a skeleton of a dinornis, a bird of about twenty-five feet in height.

'Now,' he went on, 'thanks to the assistance of a Maori gentleman, my friend the Tohunga Te-iki-pa'—(cheers, Te-iki bows his acknowledgments)—'I propose to exhibit to you this.'

With a touch on the mechanism he unrolled the valves of a gigantic incubator. Within, recumbent on cotton wool, the almost frenzied spectators perceived two monstrous eggs, like those of the Roc of Arabian fable. Te-iki-pa now chanted a brief psalm in his own language. One of the eggs rolled gently in its place; then the other. A faint crackling noise was heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition. The breed, he said, could doubtless be acclimatised.

The professors of the museum, by Jones Harvey's request, then closely examined the chickens. There could be no doubt of it, they unanimously asserted: these specimens were living deinornithe (which for scientific men, is not a bad shot at the dual of deinornis). The American continent was now endowed, through the enterprise of Mr. Jones Harvey, not only with living specimens, but with a probable breed of a species hitherto thought extinct.

The cheering was led by Captain Funkal, who waved the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Words cannot do justice to the scene. Women fainted, strong men wept, enemies embraced each other. For details we must refer to the files of The Yellow Flag. A plebiscite to select the winner of the McCabe Prize was organised by that Journal. The Moas (bred and exhibited by Mr. Jones Harvey) simply romped in, by 1,732,901 votes, the Mylodon being a bad second, thanks to the Irish vote.

Bude telegraphed 'Victory,' and Miss McCabe by cable answered 'Bully for us.'

The secret of these lovers was well kept. None who watches the fascinating Countess of Bude as she moves through the gilded saloons of Mayfair guesses that her hand was once the prize of success in a scientific exploration. The identity of Jones Harvey remains a puzzle to the learned. For the rest, a letter in which Jenkins told the story of the Berbalangs was rejected by the Editor of Nature, and has not yet passed even the Literary Committee of the Society for Psychical Research. The classical authority on the Berbalangs is still the paper by Mr. Skertchley in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. {242}The scientific gentlemen who witnessed the onslaught of the Berbalangs have convinced themselves (except Jenkins) that nothing of the sort occurred in their experience. The evidence of Captain Funkal is rejected as 'marine.'

Te-iki-pa decided to remain in New York as custodian of the Moas. He occasionally obliges by exhibiting a few feats of native conjuring, when his performances are attended by the elite of the city. He knows that his countrymen hold him in feud, but he is aware that they fear even more than they hate the ex-medicine man of his Maori Majesty.

The generosity of Bude and his Countess heaped rewards on Merton, who vainly protested that his services had not been professional.

The frequent appearance of new American novelists, whose works sell 250,000 copies in their first month, demonstrate that Mr. McCabe's scheme for raising the level of genius has been as satisfactory as it was original. Genius is riz.

But who 'cornered' the muddy pearls in Cagayan Sulu?

That secret is only known to Lady Bude, her confessor, and the Irish-American agent whom she employed. For she, as we saw, had got at the nature of poor Jenkins's project and had acquainted herself with the wonderful properties of the pearls, which she cornered.

As a patriot, she consoles herself for the loss of the other exhibits to her country, by the reflection that Berbalangs would have been the most mischievous of pauper immigrants. But of all this Bude knows nothing.



XI. ADVENTURE OF THE MISERLY MARQUIS

I. The Marquis consults Gray and Graham

Few men were, and perhaps no marquis was so unpopular as the Marquis of Restalrig, Logan's maternal Scotch cousin, widely removed. He was the last of his family, in the direct line, and on his death almost all his vast wealth would go to nobody knew where. To be sure Logan himself would succeed to the title of Fastcastle, which descends to heirs general, but nothing worth having went with the title. Logan had only the most distant memory of seeing the marquis when he himself was a little boy, and the marquis gave him two sixpences. His relationship to his opulent though remote kinsman had been of no service to him in the struggle for social existence. It carried no 'expectations,' and did not afford the most shadowy basis for a post obit. There was no entail, the marquis could do as he liked with his own.

'The Jews may have been credulous in the time of Horace,' Logan said, 'but now they insist on the most drastic evidence of prospective wealth. No, they won't lend me a shekel.'

Events were to prove that other financial operators were better informed than the chosen people, though to be sure their belief was displayed in a manner at once grotesque and painfully embarrassing.

Why the marquis was generally disliked we might explain, historically, if we were acquainted with the tale of his infancy, early youth, and adolescence. Perhaps he had been betrayed in his affections, and was 'taking it out' of mankind in general. But this notion implies that the marquis once had some affections, a point not hitherto substantiated by any evidence. Perhaps heredity was to blame, some unhappy blend of parentage. An ancestor at an unknown period may have bequeathed to the marquis the elements of his unalluring character. But the only ancestor of marked temperament was the festive Logan of Restalrig, who conspired over his cups to kidnap a king, laid out his plot on the lines of an Italian novel, and died without being detected. This heroic ancestor admitted that he hated 'arguments derived from religion,' and, so far, the Marquis of Restalrig was quite with him, if the arguments bore on giving to the poor, or, indeed, to any one.

In fact the marquis was that unpopular character, a miser. Your miser may be looked up to, in a way, as an ideal votary of Mammon, but he is never loved. On his vast possessions, mainly in coal-fields, he was even more detested than the ordinary run of capitalists. The cottages and farmhouses on his estates were dilapidated and insanitary beyond what is endurable. Of his many mansions, some were kept in decent repair, because he drew many shillings from tourists admitted to view them. But his favourite abode was almost as ruinous as his cottages, and an artist in search of a model for the domestic interior of the Master of Ravenswood might have found what he wanted at Kirkburn, the usual lair of this avaricious nobleman. It was a keep of the sixteenth century, and looked as if it had never been papered or painted since Queen Mary's time. But it was near the collieries; and within its blackened walls, and among its bleak fields and grimy trees, Lord Restalrig chose to live alone, with an old man and an old woman for his attendants. The woman had been his nurse; it was whispered in the district that she was also his illegal-aunt, or perhaps even, so to speak, his illegal stepmother. At all events, she endured more than anybody but a Scotch woman who had been his nurse in childhood would have tolerated. To keep her in his service saved him the cost of a pension, which even the marquis, people thought, could hardly refuse to allow her. The other old servitor was her husband, and entirely under her domination. Both might be reckoned staunch, in the old fashion, 'to the name,' which Logan only bore by accident, his grandmother having wedded a kinless Logan who had no demonstrable connection with the house of Restalrig. Any mortal but the marquis would probably have brought Logan up as his heir, for the churlish peer had no nearer connection. But the marquis did more than sympathise with the Roman emperor who quoted 'after me the Last Day.' The emperor only meant that, after his time, he did not care how soon earth and fire were mingled. The marquis, on the other hand, gave the impression that, he once out of the way, he ardently desired the destruction of the whole human race. He was not known ever to have consciously benefited man or woman. He screwed out what he might from everybody in his power, and made no returns which the law did not exact; even these, as far as the income tax went, he kept at the lowest figure possible.

Such was the distinguished personage whose card was handed to Merton one morning at the office. There had been no previous exchange of letters, according to the rules of the Society, and yet Merton could not suppose that the marquis wished to see him on any but business matters. 'He wants to put a spoke in somebody's wheel,' thought Merton, 'but whose?'

He hastily scrawled a note for Logan, who, as usual, was late, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. He wrote: 'On no account come in. Explanation later! Then he gave the note to the office boy, impressed on him the necessity of placing it in Logan's hands when he arrived, and told the boy to admit the visitor.

The marquis entered, clad in rusty black not unlike a Scotch peasant's best raiment as worn at funerals. He held a dripping umbrella; his boots were muddy, his trousers had their frayed ends turned up. He wore a hard, cruel red face, with keen grey eyes beneath penthouses where age had touched the original tawny red with snow. Merton, bowing, took the umbrella and placed it in a stand.

'You'll not have any snuff?' asked the marquis.

Trevor had placed a few enamelled snuff-boxes of the eighteenth century among the other costly bibelots in the rooms, and, by an unusual chance, one of them actually did contain what the marquis wanted. Merton opened it and handed it to the peer, who, after trying a pinch on his nostrils, poured a quantity into his hand and thence into a little black mull made of horn, which he took from his breast pocket. 'It's good,' he said. 'Better than I get at Kirkburn. You'll know who I am?' His accent was nearly as broad as that of one of his own hinds, and he sometimes used Scottish words, to Merton's perplexity.

'Every one has heard of the Marquis of Restalrig,' said Merton.

'Ay, and little to his good, I'll be bound?'

'I do not listen to gossip,' said Merton. 'I presume, though you have not addressed me by letter, that your visit is not unconnected with business?'

'No, no, no letters! I never was wasteful in postage stamps. But as I was in London, to see the doctor, for the Edinburgh ones can make nothing of the case—a kind of dwawming—I looked in at auld Nicky Maxwell's. She gave me a good character of you, and she is one to lippen to. And you make no charge for a first interview.'

Merton vaguely conjectured that to 'lippen' implied some sort of caress; however, he only said that he was obliged to Miss Maxwell for her kind estimate of his firm.

'Gray and Graham, good Scots names. You'll not be one of the Grahams of Netherby, though?'

'The name of the firm is merely conventional, a trading title,' said Merton; 'if you want to know my name, there it is,' and he handed his card to the marquis, who stared at it, and (apparently from motiveless acquisitiveness) put it into his pocket.

'I don't like an alias,' he said. 'But it seems you are to lippen to.'

From the context Merton now understood that the marquis probably wished to signify that he was to be trusted. So he bowed, and expressed a hope that he was 'all that could be desired in the lippening way.'

'You're laughing at my Doric?' asked the nobleman. 'Well, in the only important way, it's not at my expense. Ha! Ha!' He shook a lumbering laugh out of himself.

Merton smiled—and was bored.

'I'm come about stopping a marriage,' said the marquis, at last arriving at business.

'My experience is at your service,' said Merton.

'Well,' went on the marquis, 'ours is an old name.'

Merton remarked that, in the course of historical study, he had made himself acquainted with the achievements of the house.

'Auld warld tales! But I wish I could tell where the treasure is that wily auld Logan quarrelled over with the wizard Laird of Merchistoun. Logan would not implement the contract—half profits. But my wits are wool gathering.'

He began to wander round the room, looking at the mezzotints. He stopped in front of one portrait, and said 'My Aunt!' Merton took this for an exclamation of astonishment, but later found that the lady (after Lawrence) really had been the great aunt of the marquis.

Merton conceived that the wits of his visitor were worse than 'wool gathering,' that he had 'softening of the brain.' But circumstances presently indicated that Lord Restalrig was actually suffering from a much less common disorder—softening of the heart.

He returned to his seat, and helped himself to snuff out of the enamelled gold box, on which Merton deemed it politic to keep a watchful eye.

'Man, I'm sweir' (reluctant) 'to come to the point,' said Lord Restalrig.

Merton erroneously understood him to mean that he was under oath or vow to come to the point, and showed a face of attention.

'I'm not the man I was. The doctors don't understand my case—they take awful fees—but I see they think ill of it. And that sets a body thinking. Have you a taste of brandy in the house?'

As the visitor's weather-beaten ruddiness had changed to a ghastly ashen hue, rather bordering on the azure, Merton set forth the liqueur case, and drew a bottle of soda water.

'No water,' said the peer; 'it's just ma twal' ours, an auld Scotch fashion,' and he took without winking an orthodox dram of brandy. Then he looked at the silver tops of the flasks.

'A good coat!' he said. 'Yours?'

Merton nodded.

'Ye quarter the Douglas Heart. A good coat. Dod, I'll speak plain. The name, Mr. Merton, when ye come to the end o' the furrow, the name is all ye have left. We brought nothing into the world but the name, we take out nothing else. A sore dispensation. I'm not the man I was, not this two years. I must dispone, I know it well. Now the name, that I thought that I cared not an empty whistle for, is worn to a rag, but I cannot leave it in the mire. There's just one that bears it, one Logan by name, and true Logan by the mother's blood. The mother's mother, my cousin, was a bonny lass.'

He paused; his enfeebled memory was wandering, no doubt, in scenes more vivid to him than those of yesterday.

Merton was now attentive indeed. The miserly marquis had become, to him, something other than a curious survival of times past. There was a chance for Logan, his friend, the last of the name, but Logan was firmly affianced to Miss Markham, of the cloak department at Madame Claudine's. And the marquis, as he said, 'had come about stopping a marriage,' and Merton was to help him in stopping it, in disentangling Logan!

The old man aroused himself. 'I have never seen the lad but once, when he was a bairn. But I've kept eyes on him. He has nothing, and since I came to London I hear that he has gone gyte, I mean—ye'll not understand me—he is plighted to a long-legged shop-lass, the daughter of a ne'er-do-well Australian land-louper, a doctor. This must not be. Now I'll speak plain to you, plainer than to Tod and Brock, my doers—ye call them lawyers. They did not make my will.'