elf with the cub.

"Mr. Gilmore," said the first clerk gravely, "we thought you might
condescend to inspect our ceiling decorations through fresh foliage."

The player looked puzzled an instant but a smell of mint from the bar
cleared his mental vision. Yet again he declined. Later in the day he
shouldn't be so coy, he admitted, but one oughtn't to take too long a
running start for his jump into bed.

"No, he _might_ get there too soon," said the clerk. "My boys, sir, want
to ask you a riddle. You know Gid Hayle. How can his daughter, here, be
just like him for all the world and yet those twins be just like him for
all the same identical world, too?"

"Well put!" was the prompt rejoinder. "My wife and I have been toying
with that riddle these twenty-four hours. Those brothers are Gideon
Hayle's sons if ever a man had sons; that daughter is his from the
ground up; yet the two and the one are as unlike as night and noon."

The clerks and cub pilot agreed so approvingly that the actor, lover of
lines, was inspired to go on at more length. He remarked, in effect,
that he had never seen so striking an instance of a parent's natural
traits growing into--blemishes--in one inheritor and into graces in
another. Yet to know Gideon Hayle was to read the riddle. As quick to
anger as his sons, as full of mirth as his daughter; open-hearted,
wrong-headed, generous, tyrannous, valorous, contemptuous of all book
wisdom yet an incessant, keen inquirer with a fantastical explanation of
his own for everything in nature, science, politics, or religion.
Implacable in his prejudices, he----

"Yes," interrupted the first clerk, with amazing irrelevancy, "but a man
of Henry Clay's experience ought to have known better. Kossuth is a
gentleman who--well, general, how are you now? Mr. Gilmore, you know the
general? Senator, you know Mr. Gilmore?"

"Assuredly!" The condescending senator had known Mr. Gilmore, "a day by
contact but long by fame."

The general was civil but not suave. He remembered the player's hard
names for the committee's dead scheme. "Taking care of Henry Clay, too,
sir?" he asked him. "With so many pleasanter cares"--that meant
Ramsey--"you might let Henry Clay take care of himself."

"That's something," put in the second clerk, flushing defensively, while
the senator, with cigar cocked one way and his silk hat another, drew
Gilmore aside, "that's something Henry Clay never does."

"Right, young man. He merely tries.