, for the best; and the press is all
delighted."

At the moment, sweeping through green tule swamps, I fell direct on the
essential. "But, Pinkerton," I cried, "this lecture is the maddest of
your madnesses. How can I prepare a lecture in thirty hours?"

"All done, Loudon!" he exclaimed in triumph. "All ready. Trust me to
pull a piece of business through. You'll find it all type-written in my
desk at home. I put the best talent of San Francisco on the job: Harry
Miller, the brightest pressman in the city."

And so he rattled on, beyond reach of my modest protestations, blurting
out his complicated interests, crying up his new acquaintances, and ever
and again hungering to introduce me to some "whole-souled, grand fellow,
as sharp as a needle," from whom, and the very thought of whom, my
spirit shrank instinctively.

Well, I was in for it: in for Pinkerton, in for the portrait, in for the
type-written lecture. One promise I extorted--that I was never again to
be committed in ignorance; even for that, when I saw how its extortion
puzzled and depressed the Irrepressible, my soul repented me; and in all
else I suffered myself to be led uncomplaining at his chariot wheels.
The Irrepressible, did I say? The Irresistible were nigher truth.

But the time to have seen me was when I sat down to Harry Miller's
lecture. He was a facetious dog, this Harry Miller; he had a gallant way
of skirting the indecent which (in my case) produced physical nausea;
and he could be sentimental and even melodramatic about grisettes and
starving genius. I found he had enjoyed the benefit of my correspondence
with Pinkerton: adventures of my own were here and there horridly
misrepresented, sentiments of my own echoed and exaggerated till I
blushed to recognise them. I will do Harry Miller justice: he must have
had a kind of talent, almost of genius; all attempts to lower his
tone proving fruitless, and the Harry-Millerism ineradicable. Nay, the
monster had a certain key of style, or want of style, so that certain
milder passages, which I sought to introduce, discorded horribly, and
impoverished (if that were possible) the general effect.

By an early hour of the numbered evening I might have been observed at
the sign of the Poodle Dog, dining with my agent: so Pinkerton delighted
to describe himself. Thence, like an ox to the slaughter, he led me
to the hall, where I stood presently alone, confronting assembled San
Francisco, with no better al