at Hilary drew the Act of Consolidation
itself. At any rate, he was too valuable an opponent to neglect, and
after a certain interval of time Mr. Vane became chief counsel in the
State for the Imperial Railroad, on which dizzy height we now behold
him. And he found, by degrees, that he had no longer time for private
practice.

It is perhaps gratuitous to add that the Honourable Hilary Vane was
a man of convictions. In politics he would have told you--with some
vehemence, if you seemed to doubt--that he was a Republican. Treason to
party he regarded with a deep-seated abhorrence, as an act for which
a man should be justly outlawed. If he were in a mellow mood, with the
right quantity of Honey Dew tobacco under his tongue, he would perhaps
tell you why he was a Republican, if he thought you worthy of his
confidence. He believed in the gold standard, for one thing; in the
tariff (left unimpaired in its glory) for another, and with a wave of
his hand would indicate the prosperity of the nation which surrounded
him,--a prosperity too sacred to tamper with.

One article of his belief, and in reality the chief article, Mr. Vane
would not mention to you. It was perhaps because he had never formulated
the article for himself. It might be called a faith in the divine right
of Imperial Railroads to rule, but it was left out of the verbal
creed. This is far from implying hypocrisy to Mr. Vane. It was his
foundation-rock and too sacred for light conversation. When he allowed
himself to be bitter against various "young men with missions" who
had sprung up in various States of the Union, so-called purifiers of
politics, he would call them the unsuccessful with a grievance, and
recommend to them the practice of charity, forbearance, and other
Christian virtues. Thank God, his State was not troubled with such.

In person Mr. Hilary Vane was tall, with a slight stoop to his
shoulders, and he wore the conventional double-breasted black coat,
which reached to his knees, and square-toed congress boots. He had a
Puritan beard, the hawk-like Vane nose, and a twinkling eye that spoke
of a sense of humour and a knowledge of the world. In short, he was no
man's fool, and on occasions had been more than a match for certain New
York lawyers with national reputations.

It is rare, in this world of trouble, that such an apparently ideal
and happy state of existence is without a canker. And I have left the
revelation of the canker to the last. Ri