hough well and worthily married, officiated in
some unprecedented capacity as best man, gave Professor Ariel, one of
the ushers, an intelligent glance. The latter, being the happy possessor
of a new balloon (which he ingenuously called _Reciprocity_), supplied
to him by the always generous _Planet_, and fully elated by his present
position, answered with a broad wink. Mr. Swift, unconscious of the
thousands that were standing in their seats to look at him, and of the
general buzz of interest, tore open the colored envelope with
reportorial haste, and read as follows. It was cabled from his chief,
the proprietor of the _Planet_, now unavoidably detained in England:

"_Congratulations. Advance of one thousand a year. Report after
two months' bliss. God bless you!_"

A TERRIBLE EVENING.

Harland Slack sat in the cafe of the Parker House carelessly sipping
whiskey and Apollinaris. He fondly cherished the thought that this
combination was an excellent anti-intoxicant, a brain-quieter; on the
same principle that B & S is supposed to clarify an Englishman's head.
Harland Slack was an attractively repulsive man. He was tall, and
vigorously put together. Evening dress was becoming to him. He never
appeared after six o'clock without it: for it set off his long blond
mustache, his fine artificially curled, blond hair, and his pale regular
features to their best advantage. Seen from the front there were times
when he was considered positively handsome, after the same fashion that
an aristocratic French doll is admired. When he turned his profile, then
there appeared certain hard lines of the check and weak lines of the
forehead and chin that grated on austere physiognomists. The giddy set
of fashionable women, at whose five o'clock teas he still remained the
_eprouvette positive_, thought him adorable: the matrons with
marriageable girls thought him debatable: if he chanced upon a spiritual
woman, she considered him dangerous. The club men privately thought him
unreliable.

It was not so in college before his father died. Then the main features
of his life were promising. If he indulged in occasional gayety he did
not lose all of his self-respect. His classmates noted in him a certain
quality of strength or reserve that was supposed to emanate from himself
rather than from the hard fact that his paternal allowance was only
seven hundred a year, and that he was threatened with disinheritance if
he ran into debt