concisely, a nose boldly curved but small and
well modeled, a mouth at once sensuous and fastidious, and eyes
steadfast and benign. A dozen races between the Caspian and the
Vistula had fused to produce this machine-tool agent, and over the
union of them there was spread, like a preservative varnish, the
smoothness of an imperturbable placidity.

Footsteps crossed the landing, and there was a loud knock on his
door. Before Mr. Baruch, deliberate always, could reply, it was
pushed open and Selby, the vice-consul, his hair awry, his glasses
askew on the high, thin bridge of his nose, and with all his general
air of a maddened bird, stood upon the threshold.

"Ah, Selby, it is you, my friend!" remarked Mr. Baruch pleasantly.
"And you wish to see me yes?"

Selby advanced into the room, saving his eyeglasses by a sudden
clutch.

"Say, Baruch," he shrilled, "here's the devil of a thing! This place
gets worse every day. Feller comes into my office, kind of a peddler,
selling rugs and carpets and shows a sort of passport; Armenian, I
guess, or a Persian, or something; and when I tell him to clear out,
if he doesn't go and throw a kind of a fit right on my floor!"

"Ah!" said Mr. Baruch sympathetically. "A fit yes? You have
telephoned for the gorodski pomosh the town ambulance?"

"Yes," said Selby; "at least, I had Miss Pilgrim do that, my clerk,
you know."

"Yes," said Mr. Baruch; "I know Miss Pilgrim. Well, I will come and
see your peddler man." He rose. "But first see what I have been
buying for myself, Selby." He held out the little battered box upon
his large, firm palm. "You like it? I gave forty kopeks for it to a
man who would have taken twenty. It is nice yes?"

Selby gazed vaguely. "Very nice," he said perfunctorily. "I used to
buy 'em, too, when I came here first."

Mr. Baruch smiled that quiet, friendly smile of his, and put the box
carefully into a drawer of his desk.

The American Vice-Consulate at Nikolaief was housed in a single great
room lighted by a large window at one end overlooking the port and
the wharves, so that, entering from the gloom of the little landing,
one looked along the length of it as towards the mouth of a cave.
Desks, tables, a copying-press and a typewriter were all its gear; it
was a place as avidly specialized for its purpose as an iron foundry,
but now, for the moment, it was redeemed from its everyday barrenness
by the two figures upon the floor near the entrance.

The p