with him as far as Ragusa. If my aunt should
wish to give me a really nice scarf-pin (to be chosen by myself), as a
small recognition of the very considerable service I have done her, I
shouldn't dream of refusing. I'm not one of those who think that
because one is abroad one can go about dressed anyhow."

A few weeks later in Blackpool and places where they sing, the
following refrain held undisputed sway:

"How you bore me, Florrie,
With those eyes of vacant blue;
You'll be very sorry, Florrie,
If I marry you.
Though I'm easygoin', Florrie,
This I swear is true,
I'll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
If I marry you."

"MINISTERS OF GRACE"

Although he was scarcely yet out of his teens, the Duke of Scaw was
already marked out as a personality widely differing from others of his
caste and period. Not in externals; therein he conformed correctly to
type. His hair was faintly reminiscent of Houbigant, and at the other
end of him his shoes exhaled the right SOUPCON of harness-room; his
socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect; and his
attitude in repose had just that suggestion of Whistler's mother, so
becoming in the really young. It was within that the trouble lay, if
trouble it could be accounted, which marked him apart from his fellows.
The Duke was religious. Not in any of the ordinary senses of the word;
he took small heed of High Church or Evangelical standpoints, he stood
outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades of the
day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-practical way of his
own, which had served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle
years of boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His
family were naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. "I
am so afraid it may affect his bridge," said his mother.

The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James's Park, listening to
the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the existing political
situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.

"Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly," said the
Duke, "is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands of
pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force of brain power
and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace this or that man,
whereas you could gain your ends so much more simply by making use of
the men as you find them. If they don't suit your purpose as