to speak with a more successful journalist, who in turn gravitated toward Miss Harcourt.

"I have been watching you, Miss Harcourt, ever since you came in, hoping perhaps to learn the Massachusetts returns, but you are a very sphinx. You show us no nervousness and no arrogance. I feel sure that defeat or success would have little effect upon you, and yet you are the daughter of a politician."

"If I were less the daughter of a politician I should be less prepared for anything that tomorrow may bring forth."

"Do you read the papers, Miss Harcourt?"

asked the man of leaders.

.

"Always, Mr. Scriven; and, what is more, I understand them. Familiarity breeds contempt." The journalist fidgeted a little, twirled his mustache nervously, and looked beyond the clear eyes which so fearlessly condemned the autocrat of society and politics. "In all ages there have been classes who were exempt from the penalty of laws by an arbitrary protection. Poets armed with 'poetical license' have committed outrages upon the mother tongue not stopping short of murder. Malefactors in the middle ages screened themselves behind the walls of the Church. There is

a day set apart in Germany as Forgiveness Day, when all crimes are unpunishable. The Americans admit no refuge for criminals in church walls, set aside no day of universal condonement; but we too have our special license. It wears a

grand name, is clothed in the garments of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; but under that name more crimes are committed than are found in the 'Newgate Calendar.' Characters are lost, reputations ruined, homes desecrated, and fortunes broken. We call it the freedom of the press.""

Scriven knew that Miss Harcourt dared to say even this much to him-knew that he had poor arguments with which to answer-knew, too, that whatever calumny the press attached to her father's name, she was not the woman to shrink from reading it. If this man of the quill had ever blushed for himself, or wished to apologize for the faults of his craft, he would have liked to do it then; but the opening chords of a Moscowski polonaise, struck by one of Mrs. Cryder's protégé geniuses, silenced combat and argument.

CHAPTER XI.

THE NAUTILUS.

THE Mollusks form a most aristocratic and wealthy club in Boston. A true Mollusk must have the reticence of the clam, the attachment of the oyster, and the slowness of the snail. Without these triple qualifications it is impossible to be enrolled as a member of that distinguished association. One tried and found wanting any or all of these essential characteristics is honored by the classical Athenian blackball, the oyster-shell, this form of rejection being at once worthy the constitution of the Mollusks and the spirit of the modern Athens, their habitat. Viewed externally, the Mollusks present a hard, crusty surface to the world, which does not invite familiarity nor even acquaintance; but if some happy chance furnish an entering wedge, and one has the good fortune to reach the inner Mollusk, one finds him often tender and soft, not a bad sort of fellow after all.

The Mollusks have planted themselves very comfortably at the West End, near enough to the Back Bay to enjoy a sniff of salt water, which enables them to enlarge their bivalves occasionally; otherwise it had been feared the whole Mollusca would be discovered some morning as a huge coral island, such is the predisposition of the natural Mollusk to perfect ossification.

Arthur Bradley had passed successfully the Mollusk examination immediately after he had received his degree from the Faculty of Harvard University. It had been found that many of his ancestors had been distinguished for the requisite clam quality, all of them had shown the due oyster attachment for their native Boston bed, and he himself had never shown any defection from the snail quality. So Arthur had passed. There were several men of his class who had failed, and had received the full complement of oyster-shells necessary for their ostracism. His intimate friend and college chum Robert Mylius had entered, but had forfeited his membership by falling from allegiance to the oyster. Born in Boston, bred in Boston, he had gone away from Boston and remained four years outside its civilizing influence. He had, at the date of which we write, November of that year

when Bradley had visited Tarratine, returned to Boston, and, attempting to gain entrance to his old club, found that he had forfeited his right to do so. There were extenuating circumstances in this forfeiture. Mylius had not left Boston for New York or Chicago; he had gone to China. Mylius was,

too, an exceptional person, and he put in a special plea for himself that, as he might not enter as an oyster, he should be allowed to do so as a nautilus. A council of ten Mollusks considered this suggestion, and upon investigation found the nautilus to be a Mollusk in good and regular standing. Mylius was re-entered as a member of the club and christened "The Nautilus," and a clause was added to the constitution which prohibited the admission of another of his kind.

He was a sunny-tempered, handsome fellow before four years in China had expanded his New England nature and bronzed his skin. His friends called him a "lucky dog," and certainly the "fairy godmother" had more than atoned for any deficiency of natural inheritance. Of poor but honest parents, the traditional “fine old family," Mylius had been fostered and educated by a very distant but very opulent relative, who, a person of the most ec centric habits, had made him the object of most