d educated her son at Yale. The Vesuvius
Company hunted him up, and backed him in the little game."

"It's a glorious thing," said Cronin, half jestingly, "to be able to
discharge a government, and insert one of your own choosing, in these
days."

"Oh, it is only a matter of business," said Vincenti, stopping and
offering the stump of his cigar to a monkey that swung down from a
lime tree; "and that is what moves the world of to-day. That extra
_real_ on the price of bananas had to go. We took the shortest way of
removing it."

XVII

TWO RECALLS

There remains three duties to be performed before the curtain falls
upon the patched comedy. Two have been promised: the third is no less
obligatory.

It was set forth in the programme of this tropic vaudeville that
it would be made known why Shorty O'Day, of the Columbia Detective
Agency, lost his position. Also that Smith should come again to tell
us what mystery he followed that night on the shores of Anchuria when
he strewed so many cigar stumps around the cocoanut palm during his
lonely night vigil on the beach. These things were promised; but a
bigger thing yet remains to be accomplished--the clearing up of a
seeming wrong that has been done according to the array of chronicled
facts (truthfully set forth) that have been presented. And one voice,
speaking, shall do these three things.

Two men sat on a stringer of a North River pier in the City of New
York. A steamer from the tropics had begun to unload bananas and
oranges on the pier. Now and then a banana or two would fall from an
overripe bunch, and one of the two men would shamble forward, seize
the fruit and return to share it with his companion.

One of the men was in the ultimate stage of deterioration. As far as
rain and wind and sun could wreck the garments he wore, it had been
done. In his person the ravages of drink were as plainly visible. And
yet, upon his high-bridged, rubicund nose was jauntily perched a pair
of shining and flawless gold-rimmed glasses.

The other man was not so far gone upon the descending Highway of the
Incompetents. Truly, the flower of his manhood had gone to seed--seed
that, perhaps, no soil might sprout. But there were still cross-cuts
along where he travelled through which he might yet regain the
pathway of usefulness without disturbing the slumbering Miracles.
This man was short and compactly built. He had an oblique, dead eye,
like that of a sting-ray, and the