hese English
airs are all right, Dr. John Earl, but you may as well learn to talk
real American if you expect to chop bones and exploit microbes in this
country," and the young man glowed his admiration while plying him with
badinage.

The first greetings were scarcely over when the newspaper men made known
their mission, Tourney acting as spokesman for them all. Earl shook his
hand warmly.

"I'm awfully glad to see you," he said, "but you know I never give
interviews. I don't know how, to begin with, and I couldn't say anything
that would interest your readers. I have come back to practice my
profession in New York City; that is all I can tell you."

"But that Paris case," pleaded Bedford. "Do tell us about that."

"Did you use the Hindoo method of respiration that the Swami
Bramachunenda gave an exposition of here two or three years ago?" asked
another of the fraternity, and the others followed with different
interrogatives, but Earl laughed and waved them all away.

"I don't know what the Swami did," he said, "but if he is like some of
his brothers I'm ready to believe anything. All that I did, and a great
deal that I never thought of doing myself, or heard of anybody else
doing on this planet, was told in your papers at the time. Really, if I
had anything worth your while as a news story I would be glad to give it
to you--one of these days I may have, but you must excuse me now."

His manner was courteous but unmistakable, and turning away from them he
was soon absorbed in conversation with the pretty girl and his brother
and sister. He hardly took his eyes off the former as he recounted his
adventures abroad.

Three months previously he and Leonora Kimball had been betrothed in
Vienna, and it was agreed that they were to be married soon after his
arrival home. In a social way, the match met the approval of New York's
select set, for they belonged to equally wealthy and prominent families.
The Earls had come to New York from New England, two generations ago,
and the foundation of the family fortune had been laid in a small block
of New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, which had grown into a huge
block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and
consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs
had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had
been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family
tree of the Earls had rooted