ll be sure of receiving more or less attention
from those readers who do not skip it.

CHAPTER XLV.

The Cosmopolitan increases in seriousness.

CHAPTER I.

A MUTE GOES ABOARD A BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac
at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the
city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur
one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag,
nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends.
From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd,
it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a
stranger.

In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite
steamer Fidele, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but
unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but
evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities,
he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a
placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of
a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East;
quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though
wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what
purported to be a careful description of his person followed.

As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the
announcement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was
plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of
them from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were
enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of these
chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from another
chevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular
safe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatile
chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, the
bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers
Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky--creatures,
with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for
the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same
regions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause
for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those w