t. And Mr. Bentley, as had been
his custom for years, sat down and took off his hat, and smiled so
benignly at those around him that they immediately began to talk, to
him. It was always irresistible, this desire to talk to Mr. Bentley. If
you had left your office irritated and out of sorts, your nerves worn to
an edge by the uninterrupted heat, you invariably got off at your corner
feeling better. It was Phil Goodrich who had said that Horace Bentley
had only to get on a Tower Street car to turn it into a church. And if
he had chosen to establish that 'dernier cri' of modern civilization
where ladies go who have 'welt-schmerz' without knowing why,--a
sanitarium, he might have gained back again all the money he had lost in
giving his Grantham stock to Eldon Parr.

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he could have emptied Dalton Street of
its children. In the first place, there was the irresistible inducement
to any boy to ride several miles on a trolley without having this right
challenged by the irate guardian of the vehicle, without being summarily
requested to alight at twenty-five miles an hour: in the second place,
there was the soda water and sweet biscuit partaken of after the
baseball game in that pavilion, more imposing in one's eyes than the Taj
Mahal. Mr. Bentley would willingly have taken all Dalton Street. He had
his own 'welt-schmerz', though he did not go to a sanitarium to cure
it; he was forced to set an age limit of ten, and then establish a high
court of appeal; for there were boys whose biographies, if they are ever
written, will be as hazy as those of certain world-wide celebrities who
might be mentioned concerning the date and exact spot of the entrance
of their heroes into the light. The solemn protestations, the tears, the
recrimination even, brought pangs to the old gentleman's heart, for with
all the will in the world he had been forced in the nature of things, to
set a limit.

This limit had recently been increased by the unlooked-for appearance on
these excursions of the tall man in the blue serge suit, whose knowledge
of the national game and of other matters of vital import to youth
was gratifying if sometimes disconcerting; who towered, an unruffled
Gulliver, over their Lilliputian controversies, in which bats were waved
and fists brought into play and language used on the meaning of which
the Century dictionary is silent. On one former occasion, indeed, Mr.
Bentley had found moral suasion, a