Imprisoned in skirts, Jack Cody was awaiting his mother and relief, when there came a knock at the door, and a voice distinctly not Jane Cody's said:

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, but your town's so jolly dark, I believe I've lost my way. I'm looking for—My word, what's that!"

A parabola of light had suddenly shot out athwart the soft black night. It seemed to come from the hill to the left, and it was accompanied by the tinkle of shattered glass.

"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned longingly upward.

"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so yearningly—a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the shrill excited laughter of children.

"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on—"stranger even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for the Madigans?"

"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high carnival.

"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him.

"Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque dancing shadows.

"Eh?—I beg your pardon, I—I don't understand. Just what has happened?" asked the stranger.

"Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house afire."

"Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in striving to fathom a local mystery.

"Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em."

"You appear to know them." There was a smile hidden beneath the voice; but Jack was thinking, not of the questioner, indistinguishable in the darkness, but of the mad carnival up yonder on the hill.

"Yep. That's Split," he said. "That one—see—with the bushy lot of hair, singing and cake-walking in front. She can do a cake-walk better'n any nigger I ever see."

"Indeed!"

"That's Frank, the baby—the one that's screamin' so. You can tell her squeals; they're laughin' ones, you know."

"I suppose I ought to know. Anyway, I'm glad to be told."

"Over on the side there, where there's a kind of blotch, is the twins; they must be fighting. Don, the dog, 's mixed up in it somehow."

"My word!" exclaimed the man, softly, to himself.

"That's Kate dancing round on the porch, and the one standing high-like, right next to the fire, with her arms up stiff, as if she was running the whole show, sort of—of—"

"A priestess, say, invocating the Goddess of Kerosene!"

"Huh?—Well, that's Sissy."

"Oh, is it? Tell me—is she nice—Sissy?"

"What?" asked the boy, so surprised that he withdrew his attention from on high and stared out at the man on the door-step.

There came a laugh out of the darkness. "It is an odd question, but then everything is so odd out here, I half hoped you wouldn't notice it. But you do know them, evidently. I wonder—do you mind going up there with me and showing me the way?"

But his last question had suddenly recalled to Jack Cody the reason why he wasn't at that moment one of the dancing black figures on the hill. The boy looked from his mother's wrapper to the man's face, growing more distinct now, out on the door-step, and the amused expression he saw there his sore egotism attributed to a personal cause. So he promptly slammed the door in the man's face.

There was an instant's pause out in the blackness, made denser now that the candle's light from the cabin was cut off; then a short, nonplussed laugh.

"Miles, old chap," the young man was saying to himself, as he turned cautiously to jump from the stoop and mount the hill, "this is Bedlam you've fallen into—this mad little mining-town ten thousand miles off in a brand-new corner of the world, all hills and characters! Now, what might be the sex of that animal you were talking to? And what in the name of peace are these Madigans? Are they the ones you're look—Steps, as I value my immortal soul!" he exclaimed, rubbing his shin where he had struck against the wandering Madigan stairway. "It would not have surprised me, now, if I had had to climb that hill on my hands and knees, and stand on my head when I got to the door, to knock at it with my heels!"

Miss Madigan's demeanor was beautiful to see. Just a bit—oh, the least bit of I-told-you-so in her manner, but also a generous willingness to postpone the acceptance of apologies due to one long misunderstood, and to take for granted the family's obligation.

"The estate must be worth at least ten thousand a year," she confided in her delighted perturbation to Frances, as she curled her hair. And Frank looked up at her, soulful and uncomprehending, and a bit cross-eyed, for the curl dangling down over her nose. "He'll marry Kate, of course—I had no idea he was so young. He'll just be the savior of the whole family. It's a providence,—Miles Madigan's dying when he did,—and wasn't it fortunate that Nora sent my letter back?... You will be good at the table, Frances, and show cousin Miles how nicely you can use your fork?... He is practically a cousin.... Have you washed your hands?"

"Hm-mm," murmured Frank, mendaciously. And then, as Aunt Anne appeared to doubt her word, "Just you ask God if I haven't," she suggested solemnly, carefully putting her hands behind her.

But Miss Madigan had no time to put questions to so distant an authority. She had Wong to placate—Wong with his wash-day face on, grim, ill-tempered, hurried, defying the world to put even the smallest additional burden on his shoulders on Monday. And Miles Morgan just arrived from Ireland!

And Francis talking to him in the library, in that distant, watchful, uncompromising way of his, that was just as likely as not to send the young man off in a huff.

"One needn't insult a man just because he's rich and a relative!" Miss Madigan's exclamation was uttered aloud unconsciously, so excited was she. It ended with a gasp, as Sissy collided with her on the way from peeking through the half-open library door at her father and his guest.

It was the bedroom, Kate's and Irene's, that Sissy was bound for; for there, in solemn conclave, the junior Madigans were assembled, waiting for their scout's report.

"He's big—but not so big as the Avalanche," she began the moment she had shut the door behind her and faced the questioning eyes that commanded her to stand and deliver. "He's straight, too, but not so poker-stiff as Mrs. Ramrod. He's got a big haw-haw voice, and scrubs every word he says with a tooth-brush before he says it. His hands are as white—as white; and they're cleaner than Crosby Pemberton's. He's got a tan shirt on, plaited in front, and every time Aunt Anne moves he's up like a jumping-jack till she gets sat down again. He says 'My word!' and 'in the States'—like that. He's got a mustache the color of your hair, Split, a scrubby, stiffy little mustache. His eyes are little twinkling things, and I believe—" she paused in her indictment to give the criminal the benefit of the doubt—"I do believe he had gloves on when he first came! I won't be sure; but, anyway, I hate him."

A gratified sigh rose from the Madigans assembled. It was good to have definite information, to know that this Miles Morgan was hatable. For the Madigans loved to hate any one who could put them under obligations—when they did not spend their very souls in a passion of gratitude to him. But for this interloping, distant relative from foreign shores they were prepared. They were ready to outrage him, to throw his patronage in his teeth, if he dared offer it, to out-Madigan the Madigans, if that were necessary; to disgust him and satisfy their pride, wounded by the insolence of his prosperity. Yes, it was good to hear Sissy's frank declaration of war. For war was as the breath of the Madigans' nostrils. They knew themselves there, and, though they might have trusted Sissy, they had feared for a moment that her report might not be all they had hoped.

"We'll show him," said Split.

"A patronizing, affected Irishman!" snorted Sissy, informally now that her official duties were ended.

"He thinks he'll come out here and run the whole family," said Fom, aggrieved.

"And show off how rich he is, and turn up his nose at things," said Bep, "and boss us. I'd like to see him try it!"

"And be shocked at what we don't know, and what we do do, and what we haven't seen and learned. I dare him just to say 'abroad' to me!" cried Kate, with a flash in her eye.

A chorus of groans went up from the indignant assemblage.

"Aunt Anne," put in Frank, a bit puzzled, "says he's the savior of the fam'ly. What's a—"

"The savior of the family! The savior!" mocked Sissy, genuflecting sarcastically. "The savior of the family will have you sent to a convent, Split, 'where young ladies are taught to behave properly.' The savior'll get a nursemaid for you, Frank, and you'll have to go about always holding her hand and wearing socks in the English style that'll show your bare, naked legs and—"

"I won't! I won't!" Tears of terror stood in Frank's eyes.

"The savior'll put a stop, Fom, to your—Kate Madigan, are you changing your dress?" Sissy's voice fell suddenly, and she put the question in a calm, magisterial tone that sent every eye in the room on a query toward the eldest Madigan.

Kate turned at bay. She had slipped off her waist, and the red was flushing her long throat and small, spirited face. "Well, miss, suppose I am?" she demanded hotly.

"She always changes her dress for dinner, you know," came in a sarcastic sneer from Split. "She wants to show our dear cousin how swell we are. We all wear low-necked rigs, and father has his swallowtail, and—"

"Shall I bring you the curling-iron, Kathy?" mocked Sissy.

"Don't you want a rose for your hair, Kathleen?"

"Or a ribbon here and there, as Mrs. Ramrod says, Kitty?"

"Aunt Anne says," said Frank, feeling that this was some sort of game and that her turn had come, "he's going to mawwy you. Is he, Kate?"

The white cashmere with the red-embroidered rosebuds slipped from Kate's hand. All innocent of malicious intent, Frank's shot had scored. The cry of the Pack that leaped about her could not touch Kate after this. She was frozen in by maidenly prudery, by childish self-consciousness, by Madigan perversity. When the bell rang she went in to dinner in her old pink gingham, her head high, her lips set, her eyes unseeing.

"She's got 'em," Sissy whispered to Split.

"Yep, that's the sulks all right," Split nodded.

"This is Kate." Miss Madigan, brave in her new purple gown with the lace collar at her throat, shot a reproachful glance at the unadorned young lady of the house. "Your cousin, Miles Morgan, Kate."

"Howd' ye do?" Kate said coldly, ignoring his outstretched hand and passing on to her seat, where she began busily to serve the butter.

The savior of the family looked after her, interested. Though guilty of every count in Sissy's indictment, he was not accustomed to being overlooked by such very young ladies.

"And this is Irene," said Miss Madigan, a tremor in her voice; she, too, knew now that Kate "had 'em." "This one is Cecilia; the twins, Bessie and Florence; and Frances, the baby."

The savior of the family glanced along the line of five blank faces, and felt the perfunctory touch of five small, slippery hands with nothing more human about their clasp than the childish masks above them.

"I say, how do you tell one another apart?" he asked, with a sudden gleam in his eye, as they passed him and slid into their places.

A dozen pitying eyes looked coldly at him; half a dozen small mouths curved disdainfully. His remark seemed to make them more than ever like mechanisms—hostile ones.

Miss Madigan dropped the soup-ladle in her confusion. To that experienced lady there was something ominous about so unbroken a union of Madigans; she remembered with sorrow the few times any subject had found them unanimous.

But Madigan came in just then, took his seat at the head, looked mechanically for the banished dog and the cat, and Dusie, chirping madly in her cage to attract his attention to the fact of her cruel and unusual imprisonment. He cleared his throat and took up the carver—and immediately Miles Morgan was conscious of an unbending of the small Madigans—a cuddling together, so to speak, and a swift interchange of impressions.

"You haven't given me an opportunity to explain, Miss Madigan—" he began, in the pause during which Madigan carved strenuously.

"'Aunt Anne,' if you please, my dear boy," urged Miss Madigan, warmly. "The relationship's distant, but now that you are with us we can have no ceremony out here in the wilds."

"Oh, thank you." The savior, turning toward her, saw the fattest little Madigan nudge her red-haired neighbor savagely. She was evidently angry at something. "It's good of you to take me in like this. What I want to say is that the train was late crawling crookedly up and around the mountains. I had no idea of arriving in the evening and coming in upon you this way. But when I got here, the town looked so savage, don't you know, so—drear—and desolate and—and flimsy, I got a bit home-sick—there! The thought of all you people, my own people, housed somewhere in the spraddling town, called to me. I positively couldn't wait till morning. You'll forgive me—Aunt Anne?"

A suppressed gurgle came from a blonde Madigan on the other side of the table, choking over her soup at this endearment. A brunette just her height spoke rapidly to her and persuasively, but to no avail. Alarming sounds came from the victim till presently a very dignified, small fat person rose from her seat, made her way to the nearly suffocated blonde, gave her a thump between the shoulder-blades that brought tears of another variety to the sufferer's eyes, and walked composedly back to her seat.

"How can you be so rough, Sissy!" Aunt Anne exclaimed in an agitated voice.

"Ah—Sissy!" The savior leaned forward, looking across with a smile in his eye that might have melted any heart save so savage a Madigan's. "So you are Sissy."

"My name," said that young person, meeting his smiling eye coldly, "is Cecilia."

"But your friends call you Sissy?"

"Yes, my friends do," admitted the perfectionist, with an accent that was supposed to be crushing.

"And you sign yourself so in your letters?" he went on pleasantly.

"My letters?"

"Yes; your informal little notes, you know."

Sissy laid down her spoon. A sudden distaste for eating, for living, for breathing had come upon her. She had forgotten her postscript to that unhappy letter; it was all so long ago, and Aunt Anne's letters never had had a sequel! But before her now the savior's head seemed to bob up and down sickeningly, while a voice cried in her ears so loud she fancied the whole table must hear it:

"You—whoever you are—needn't bother to answer this. None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's. It's only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and we'll thank you to mind your own business.

"Sissy Madigan."

The savior threw back his head in a quite boyish way and laughed aloud as he watched her face.

A cold rage seized Sissy. To be laughed at before the whole table! She hated him; she knew she hated him!

"I don't understand," said Madigan, feeling called upon to say something that was not vituperative at his own dinner-table. "You could never have seen a note of Sissy's, Mr. Morgan?"

"Never." The savior lied like a gentleman.

But he was mistaken if he supposed that he had placated Cecilia. She would not even meet his eyes, those eyes that twinkled so enjoyingly.

The savior tried Irene.

"You and I have hair the same color," he said genially. "I hope your temper isn't like mine, too."

"I hope not," she answered stiffly.

He laughed again, that big, amused laugh. Split's eyes shot fire. Evidently the Madigans were funnier than they knew.

"Now, I wonder," he said, "would that be a compliment or a confession?"

"Irene is trying and succeeding better every day in gaining self-control," interposed Aunt Anne, with hasty amiability. To discuss Irene's temper in committee of the whole, like that—the temerity of the man! "Won't you have some more mutton?" she pressed. "It's wash-day, you know, and it's just a pick-up dinner; but we're so glad to have you, if you'll excuse—"

"The apology's due from me, you know," he interrupted. "And the good fortune's mine, too. Fancy me dining the evening of my arrival at that brick barn they call the hotel down yonder! It will be hard enough when I really have to live there."

"You do not surely expect—" began Madigan, pausing over his strawberries.

"To live 'out West'? Will you let me tell you how it happened, Mr. Madigan? There isn't much to it—just this: Miles Madigan, as you know—do you know?—was not the man to leave much behind him. Not that he'd deliberately wrong a fellow, poor old chap, but—well—oh, you understand! Well, when his solicitors got through subtracting and dividing and subdividing, the heir—one Miles Morgan, bred to do nothing, and with a talent for that profession, I must admit—found himself poor, with just enough to live on. The ten thousand a year had—just slipped through Miles Madigan's fingers."

"Oh!" Miss Madigan's voice was sympathizing, disappointed.

"Then"—it was Frank's clear treble; she hadn't understood much, but she knew what "poor" meant: a Madigan learned that early—"then you're not going to mawwy Kate?"

Kate went white, while Miss Madigan's delicate face flushed purple, and Split pinched Sissy's arm, in her excitement, till that young woman cried aloud.

"Frances—outside!" stormed Madigan.

"Oh, Mr. Madigan—please!" deprecated the savior, holding out his arms to the whimpering Frances, who jumped into them as to a refuge. "No, little girl," he said, bending down to reassure her, "I'm going to marry Sissy; that's why I came out here."

A gasp of relief parted Kate's trembling lips. She was very near being fond of the detested savior in that moment, in her gratitude to him for not having looked at her.

But oh, the disdain of Sissy! It was such a very poor joke, in her opinion. Her round little face with its dots for features looked so sour and supercilious, as she passed the savior with averted eyes on her way out of the dining-room,—the children were withdrawing now,—that he could not resist putting out a hand to stop her.

"You will have me, Sissy?" he begged with a laugh. "Think of a man coming clear out here with so little encouragement as I had. Such devotion might appeal to a heart of stone!"

His enemy stood with downcast eyes, the red slowly mounting to the smoothed-back brown hair.

"Sissy's Number One in her class," ventured Frank, as a recommendation.

"I'm not!" flamed forth Sissy. "I never was, or—or if I was it was because of—of—"

"Why, Sissy!" interjected Miss Madigan, grieved.

"Of a mistake of some sort," suggested the savior, soothingly. "Well, I suppose I could marry a girl that was only Number Two."

"I'm never Number Two—never! I'm Number—Twenty!" Sissy's eyes were raised for a moment to his—a revelation of the insulted dignity seething within her.

"Oh, well, a Number Twenty wife is good enough; but we'd have to live in Ireland, I suppose," said the savior, philosophically.

A passion of wrath at his dullness filled the clever Sissy, and she sought for a moment before she found the weapon to hurt him.

"In Ireland, you know," she said, as deliberately as she could for fear of breaking into tears before she had delivered the insult, "the pigs live in the parlor, and—and the children have no place to sleep and—go barefooted!"

"Oh!" The savior was stunned for an instant, but he recovered. "No, I didn't know. But in Nevada, I'm told, the Indians eat Irishmen alive, and those that are left are shot down by white desperados on C Street every day just at noon! We couldn't live here, could we?"

Sissy gasped. She opened her lips as if to speak, but closed them again, and suddenly, in the instant's pause, there came an irresistible giggle from Split, already out in the hall.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. She shook off her suitor's detaining hand and bolted.

"I couldn't help it," the savior said to Madigan, who was looking at him with that perplexed frown which the manifestation of his children's eccentricities so often brought to his face. "She is delightful. What jolly times we'll have getting acquainted! How fortunate you are, Mr. Madigan, to have these—"

Madigan threw up his head, a challenge in his eye. Was he even to be congratulated upon his misfortunes?

"I always said," the savior went on, with a chuckle,—"in fact, I began to say it before I got into knickerbockers,—that I intended to be the father of a family numbering at least a 'baker's dozzen.' I believe I had a vague notion that by means of superabundance of paternity I could atone to myself for my lack of other family ties. I was always so beastly alone. Yet no one—Miles Madigan least of all—saw the pathos of my lot. 'He's young and unencumbered,' he said of me toward the last when he was reminded of how little he had left for me. 'He'll get along. Besides, there's that wildcat mine out in the States; I'm leaving him that.'"

Madigan's pipe fell to the floor; he had been filling it for his after-dinner smoke. "You've got the Tomboy!" he exclaimed.

"That interests you?" Morgan asked.

Kate, who picked up the pipe and handed it to her father, as she passed, the last of the line of young Madigans on the way out, saw how Francis Madigan's hand shook. Mechanically she paused and listened.

"I—I was swindled out of my share of that mine," he said harshly. "Miles Madigan knew that in fairness half of it was mine. I found it. I worked for it. I put aside all other opportunities to devote myself to developing it. I sacrificed my children and my business to it. I gave up the best years of my life to it. I bore disappointment and poverty because of it. I was at the end of my tether when Miles Madigan went into it with me; and yet when I saw he was bent on freezing me out of it, I—I— But after he got it he didn't know what to do with it. He left it to be worked and himself fleeced by strangers. But—it killed my wife, and left me, after all those years of litigation, an embittered, beggared, broken man!"

"And so it's but fair"—to Kate, shivering at the revelation in her father's voice, Miles Morgan's words seemed like soothing music—"it's but fair that you and I should handle the thing together—what there is of it, Mr. Madigan," he added hastily, as Madigan was about to speak; and he leaned forward, holding out his hand boyishly. "There may not be much, but I can get English capital to develop it, at a sacrifice of half its value now, and its possibilities. So that will leave only quarter shares for each of us. I may be offering you only a lot of work and a disappointment at the end. But the thing seemed worth enough to me, 'way over on the other side, to come out here and look into it myself. And one thing that made it seem so was the desperate battle you had fought to keep it. I hoped—I hoped you'd like me well enough, when we got to know each other, to help me with your experience, and—frankly, to help yourself in helping me. I had no intention of saying all this to-night, but—allow me, Cousin Kate."

He had dropped Madigan's hand after a hearty squeeze, and was standing holding open the door for Kate to pass.

It was a glorified Kate, for, lo, the veil of ill humor had fallen; a treacherous Kate, Sissy would have said, for she shone out now, warm and sparkling, upon the man who had had the discrimination to let a brood of small Madigans pass without special attention, yet who jumped to his feet when the young-lady daughter of the house made her exit, and stood looking after her till Madigan hauled him off to the library to talk about the Tomboy.

That certain contentment which followed after an unusually good dinner, when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed by each performer in turn; said couplets being necessarily original and relevant locally. The accompaniment—an easy change of chords—was played on the piano colla voce. And no one minded in the least a foot, more or less, at the end of a verse. The joke was the thing with the Madigans, and the impromptu rhyme that brought down the house was the one that hit hardest.

For Old Mother Gibson was a satire, a pasquinade, a flesh-and-blood libel done in rhyme, of wildest license both as to form and matter, and set to music—to be discharged full at the head of the victim. It began in an orderly way, every Madigan in her turn playing both parts of victim and cartoonist. But it degenerated into an open and shameless mimicry of Aunt Anne, of Francis Madigan, of the school-master, Mrs. Ramrod, the Misses Blind-Staggers, Professor Trask, Dr. Murchison, Wong, Indian Jim, and, finally, each of the other's tenderest folly—till a living caricature too true or too cutting precipitated an appeal to arms, and the Lighthouse, which was always in the way, was tipped over in the mÊlÉe, and had to be thrown out of the window, there to burn itself into darkness innocuously.

Old Mother Gibson was given by a full cast the night of the savior's arrival. Though Jane Cody had been merciless, Jack, tempted beyond his powers of resistance by the sounds of revelry upon the hill, was stalking about in melancholy masquerade among its personnel. Bombey Forrest, her delicate head looking like a surprised sunflower upon its masculine stalk, had come in, and Crosby Pemberton, looking as much out of place in his immaculate linen and small Tuxedo as either of these, was joyous at being among Madigans again.

You might have heard—if you'd stood out on the piazza looking in, and happened to have the key to the riddle—a hint in verse of every Madigan escapade, of every Madigan failing, of all the Madigan jokes, on Old Mother Gibson nights. You would have seen even Kate—young-lady Kate, who had once substituted in a school—join in this mad revel, with an appetite for fun that showed how much of a child she still was.

An impressionable young Irishman, who had come out upon the piazza to smoke a cigar and think himself back into his usual poise after a day full of new experiences, had his attention attracted by the strumming on the piano; and glancing in through the open window, he saw a slender, graceful girl, her dark head rising lightly from the sailor collar of a pink gingham blouse. She was balancing lightly as she walked, keeping time to the rhythm, and followed by a procession of children in single file. (A belief in the efficacy of motion to stimulate one's power of improvisation made Old Mother Gibson the liveliest of games.) And arriving at the center of the stage, she delivered herself in a singsong of the following:

It didn't seem a very funny or apposite ditty to Miles Morgan, but, to judge by its effect upon those within, it was exquisitely witty. The whole company doubled up with laughter. It giggled till its collective sides must have ached; then it slowly and gaspingly subsided. When it had quieted down, the piano began again, and a red-headed Madigan, intoxicated by the music, the license of the time, and the excitement accompanying creative work, danced a fantastic pas seul, as she flew about in the Mother Gibson merry-go-round.

sang Split, and the parlor yelled itself hoarse with uproarious delight.

The fat little girl at the piano began to play, and stopped several times, that she might wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and get her breath. At last, with a squaring of her shoulders and a stiffening of backbone that seemed queerly familiar to Morgan, watching outside, she half drawled, half sang, with an unmistakable accent:

A sudden enlightenment came to Miles Morgan. For a moment the red flamed up in his cheek, and if Split could have seen his face she might have fancied that some imp had caught her likeness, when her temper had got beyond her control, and set it on this man's body.

"The impudent little beggars!" Morgan cried furiously. "My word!" He stopped, remembering the use to which his favorite exclamation had been put. "But what a saucy lot!" He was laughing before he had finished wording his thought.

He was interested now, and listened with a grin to Fom's declaration that

He saw even Frank strutting in the ring, though she was capable only of a repetition of the classic phrase with which each couplet began. And he laughed with the rest at Bep,—poor, unready Bep, set as by a musical time-lock and bound to go off,—getting slower and slower in motion as well as utterance, the accompaniment retarding sympathetically as the critical moment approached when she must be delivered of her rhyme.

she began her singsong. "No, no! Wait. I know another. 'T ain't fair," she stammered in a prose parenthesis.

"Stop laughing, now; wait a minute. You don't give me a chance, Sissy. You play faster for me than for anybody else! You do it a-purpose, too, just 'cause you know it's easy to bluster me.

Bep stopped suddenly, for through the glass doors came the subject of her lay. He had a finger to his lips as he glanced at Sissy's back—a hint that the rest of the company seized delightedly. And when the music began again, he was not ashamed to make this contribution:

At first the accompanist, accustomed to the rodomontade of voice as well as gesture of the excited performers, was not aware of the interloper. When she finally spun around and saw the savior singing in the midst of his libelers, she let him finish the couplet unaccompanied, and sat, a fat, shocked statue glued to the piano-stool, staring at him.

It was absurd of him, but there was something in Old Mother Gibson, as the Madigans sang and played her, that turned the soberest of heads. And the savior's forte was not in being staid. He fell upon his knee before her.

"Forgive me, O Sissy, for not being a Madigan," he begged, "and receive me into the fold!"

She looked down at him, self-conscious, embarrassed; yet the hidden sentimentality of her nature was appealed to by the masculine young face turned half laughing, half seriously, to her.

"Are you sure," she asked shyly, "that you're not one already?"

It is of record that one evening during that summer when the old Tomboy mine was reopened, a young Irishman newly arrived on the Comstock escorted down to Fitzmeier's—where, everybody knows, there is ice-cream to be had—six girls of assorted ages, one boy, and two young persons whose garments belied their sex. Yet they all seemed rampantly happy and quite unashamed.