n a whole bottle of Delatour, but when Rennsler Van
Vort quietly told the servant he would take an Apollinaris lemonade
without sugar, it was too much for the dashing Duncan. "When do you take
orders, old man?" he said. "All you need is a cowl and sandals, for
nature has kindly tonsured your locks for you. I suppose you will soon
be leading the singing at noon prayer meetings."

"I am off my liquor," Van Vort replied; "but if I do come to noon
meetings I feel sure I'll do better with Sankey hymns than I do now with
comic ditties."

"Don't start Rennsler preaching," Howard-Jones interjected, "he's primed
with moral bosh and the atmosphere is too depressed already. What brings
a hard-working man like you uptown at four o'clock? I thought you didn't
knock off until five."

"I don't," Duncan replied, "but I am going out to Chicago to-morrow and
I am taking a half holiday to prepare my nerves for the strain."

"Going to Chicago," the three interposed almost in a breath.

"Yes, and, worse luck, I don't know when I shall get back. I am going
out for an English syndicate we have in tow. The Britons have bought all
the breweries and stock-yards out there, and now they are after
elevators."

"'Elevators'", exclaimed Waterman, "I should think they do need a few
in London; those beastly 'lifts' they have in the hotels there are about
the only British institution I don't admire. But what have you got to do
with elevators?"

"Don't be an ass, Roland," Duncan replied. "It is about time you knew
that the chief industry of 'the city of the future', as some fool
journalist calls Chicago,--pork of course excepted,--is grain, and
elevators are the warehouses where it is stored. I am going out to work
a scheme to buy them all up, make a trust, and sell the stock in London.
Our house are the middlemen between Chicago and the Britons. Now do you
see?"

"Well, I'm deuced glad I didn't go into Wall Street," Roland replied. "I
shouldn't care to be shut up in that beastly hole, Chicago. I don't
believe there is a sportsman in the place. I stopped there a day once on
my way to Minnesota, grouse shooting, and I never saw such a rum place.
I put up at the biggest hotel in the town, and there wasn't much to
complain of in the size of it; but the dirt and the niggers were too
much for me. I had to eat dinner at two o'clock and I wish you could
have seen how they managed it. I was met at the door by a six-foot black
man in a waistcoat that wa