uby. "Oh, I wish you'd do it to this company."

The boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in
applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable
deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors. The priest
opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens,
monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet
sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back
scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure
standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat,
evidently a common messenger. "Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?" he
asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr. Blount started, and
stopped in his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident
astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared,
and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.

"I'm sick at being such a nuisance, colonel," he said, with the cheery
colonial conventions; "but would it upset you if an old acquaintance
called on me here tonight on business? In point of fact it's Florian,
that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out
West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business
for me, though I hardly guess what."

"Of course, of course," replied the colonel carelessly--"My dear chap,
any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition."

"He'll black his face, if that's what you mean," cried Blount, laughing.
"I don't doubt he'd black everyone else's eyes. I don't care; I'm not
refined. I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top
hat."

"Not on mine, please," said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.

"Well, well," observed Crook, airily, "don't let's quarrel. There are
lower jokes than sitting on a top hat."

Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and
evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his
most sarcastic, magisterial manner: "No doubt you have found something
much lower than sitting on a top hat. What is it, pray?"

"Letting a top hat sit on you, for instance," said the Socialist.

"Now, now, now," cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian
benevolence, "don't let's spoil a jolly evening. What I say is, let's
do something for the company tonight. Not blacking faces or sitting on
hats, if you don't like those--but something of the sort. Why couldn't
we have a proper ol