ivion to world standards,
their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial
down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They
saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering
hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the charms, and
liked them better.

So it was that our friend the senator had early discovered Basile and
later had found a capital use for him. In him he saw a most timely
opportunity, one not afforded by anybody besides. He showed the youth
marked attentions, affirming in him all the men's rights and boys'
privileges he had ever thought of, got him assigned to his sick
brother's place at table, presented him to the committee of seven,
called him Gideon by mistake, and at the right moment made him an
instrument, not to say tool, by diverting his idle course through the
crowd into a highly successful soliciting of signatures to the
committee's, or let us say his own, the senator's, petition.

Unlucky task! An exceptional feature of the _Votaress_ was that her
passenger guards ran aft in full width all round her under the stern
windows of the ladies' cabin. Beneath, the lower deck ended in a fantail
of unusual overhang, around whose edge curved the stout bars of the
"bull-ring," to fence it off from the billowing white surge that writhed
after the rudder blade and the trailing yawl, so close below. Among the
petition's subscribers were several pretty girls of an age at which
their only important business was beauty and levity and who gave small
heed to the document's purport, readily assuming that nothing _they_
were asked to sign needed to be taken seriously. There was much laughter
over the performance. They turned it into a "Signing of the
Declaration," patterned after the old steel engraving. One of them, as
the scroll lay open on the rail under her pen hand, unwittingly set foot
in a scrubbing bucket kept there with a line attached for bailing water
from the river, and was so unnerved by the fun of it that all at once
the scroll flirted back into scroll form and fell through the whirling
air that eddied behind the boat. Yet it had the luck to drop upon the
deck below, and there presently an immigrant stood mutely gazing up with
it in his lifted hand. Otto Marburg came and stood looking up beside
him.

Dropping the bucket's line through the balusters under the rail, Basile
stepped over the guards and proceeded, while the girls ac