oured forth
an extravagant eulogy of her beauty and her devotion.

"If she were mine, I should be on the ragged edge with jealousy every
hour of the day and night," said the judge, as they set their glasses
down.

"Y-y-you'd have reason to! B-b-but I'm a horse of a different c-c-color,
old boy! W-w-women have p-p-preferences," the doctor replied, pulling
out the ends of his mustache and winking at the captain and his mate,
who stupidly nodded their appreciation of the hit.

"When honeysuckles close their petals to hummingbirds, Venus will shut
the door on Adonis," responded the judge, draining his glass and smiling
into its depths.

The quack was too far gone in his cups to comprehend or even to be
curious as to the significance of this sneer and went on sounding his
own virtues and Pepeeta's beauty while the judge provoked him to the
fullest exhibition of his colossal vanity. He took a sinister delight in
drawing him out. It was the pleasure of a cat playing with the mouse,
which it is about to devour, or of savages mocking the man who is about
to run the gauntlet. He exulted in the contrast of this proud man's
present confidence, and the humiliation which awaited him within the
next few hours.

The quack was an easy victim. His career of prosperity had met with but
a single serious interruption and he had so entirely forgotten his
dangerous sickness in his perfect health that he was seldom troubled by
foreboding as to the future. Never had he possessed more confidence of
life than at the very moment when all his hopes, all his confidence,
all his faith, were about to be shattered.

Our misfortunes draw a train of shadows behind them; but they often
project a glowing light before them. Sickness is often preceded by the
most bounding health, failure by unexampled success, misery by
irrepressible emotions of exultation. Too bright a sunshine as well as
too dark a shadow is often the herald of a storm upon the sea of life.

But ebullitions of happiness and confidence did not excite the
apprehension of the quack. Each bumper of wine was followed by a new
outburst of vanity. The captain and the mate had already succumbed to
the potent influence of the liquors which they had been drinking, and
amidst his maudlin speeches the quack's tongue was becoming hopelessly
tangled.

The judge was as sober as at the beginning of the feast and with a smile
upon his lips in which cynicism was incarnate, waited until the doctor