d speeches,
but I can remember every syllable that Sam Ward said one night at your
grandfather's ten years ago; and if I have once tasted a good wine, I
never forget its fashion of taking hold."

This is an expurgated edition of what he said; his profanity kept up a
running accompaniment, like soft and distant rolling thunder.

"I got this wine at the sale of the Marquis of Santa Rita. I heard you
speak of him, I don't know how long ago, and the minute I read in the
paper that he had turned up his toes, I cabled the consul at Cadiz--you
know him, a wild Irishman named Calpin--to go to the sale of his
effects and get this wine. He cabled back, 'What shall I pay?' I
answered, 'Head your dispatch again: Get means get!' Some men have got
no sense. I did not mind the price of the wine, but it riled me to have
to pay for the two cables."

He poured out another glass and drank it drop by drop, getting, as he
said, "the worth of his money every time."

"Have some more?" he said to Farnham.

"No, thank you."

"Then I'll put it away. No use of giving it to men who would prefer
sixty-cent whiskey."

Having done this, he turned again to Farnham, and said, "I told you the
Old Boy was to pay. This is how. The labor unions have ordered a
general strike; day not fixed; they are holding meetings all over town
to-night. I'll know more about it after midnight."

"What will it amount to?" asked Farnham.

"Keen savey?" replied Temple, in his Mississippi River Spanish. "The
first thing will be the closing of the mills, and putting anywhere from
three thousand to ten thousand men on the streets. Then, if the strike
gains the railroad men, we shall be embargoed, ---- boiling, and
safety-valve riveted down."

Farnham had no thought of his imperilled interests. He began instantly
to conjecture what possibility of danger there might be of a
disturbance of public tranquillity, and to wish that the Beldings were
out of town.

"How long have you known this?" he asked.

"Only certainly for a few hours. The thing has been talked about more
or less for a month, but we have had our own men in the unions and did
not believe it would come to an extremity. To-day, however, they
brought ugly reports; and I ought to tell you that some of them concern
you."

Farnham lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.

"We keep men to loaf with the tramps and sleep in the boozing kens. One
of them told me to-day that at the first serious disturbance a lot of