ould not believe the Irish
biography, leaving it to him to decide what he wanted to do about it?

Nicolovius, tramping in only a few minutes behind Queed, greeted his
young friend as blandly as ever. Physically, he seemed tired; much dust
of city streets clung to his commonly spotless boots; but his eyes were
so extraordinarily brilliant that Queed at first wondered if he could
have been drinking. However, this thought died almost as soon as it was
born.

The professor walked over to the window and stood looking out, hat on
head. Presently he said: "You saw the grand parade, I suppose? For
indeed there was no escaping it."

Queed said that he had seen it.

"You had a good place to see it from, I hope?"

Excellent; Miss Weyland's porch.

"Ah!" said Nicolovius, with rather an emphasis, and permitted a pause to
fall. "A most charming young lady--charming," he went on, with his note
of velvet irony which the young man peculiarly disliked. "I hear she is
to marry your Mr. West. An eminently suitable match in every way. Yet I
shall not soon forget how that delightful young man defrauded you of the
editorship."

Silence from Mr. Queed, the question of the editorship having already
been thoroughly threshed out between them.

"I, too, saw the gallant proceedings," resumed Nicolovius, retracing his
thought. "What an outfit! What an outfit!"

He dropped down into his easy chair by the table, removed his straw hat
with traces of a rare irritation in his manner, put on his black skull
cap, and presently purred his thoughts aloud:--

"No writer has yet done anything like justice to the old soldier cult in
the post-bellum South. Doubtless it may lie out of the province of you
historians, but what a theme for a new Thackeray! With such a fetish
your priestcraft of the Middle Ages is not to be compared for a moment.
There is no parallel among civilized nations; to find one you must go to
the Voodooism of the savage black. For more than a generation all the
intelligence of the South has been asked, nay compelled, to come and bow
down before these alms-begging loblollies. To refuse to make obeisance
was treason. The entire public thought of a vast section of the country
has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered
gray shirt. Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne'er-do-well
lets out what is known as a 'rebel yell.' The most polished and profound
speech conceivable is answered when a jacka