austere completeness of his reform. Nor did Mr.
Woodridge, who failed to understand the only actor in this little comedy
who might perhaps have differed from them all.

A month later James Reddy married Kelly Woodridge, in the chilly little
church at Oakdale. Perhaps by that time it might have occurred to him
that although the freshness and fruition of summer were everywhere, the
building seemed to be still unwarmed. And when he stepped forth with his
bride, and glanced across the prosperous landscape toward the distant
bay and headlands of San Francisco, he shivered slightly at the dryly
practical kiss of the keen northwestern Trades.

But he was prosperous and comfortable thereafter, as the respectable
owner of broad lands and paying shares. It was said that Mrs. Reddy
contributed much to the popularity of the hotel by her charming freedom
from prejudice and sympathy with mankind; but this was perhaps only due
to the contrast to her more serious and at times abstracted husband. At
least this was the charitable opinion of the proverbially tolerant and
kind-hearted Baroness Streichholzer (nee Merrydew, and relict of the
late lamented Louis Sylvester, Esq.), whom I recently had the pleasure
of meeting at Wiesbaden, where the waters and reposeful surroundings
strongly reminded her of Oakdale.

THE HEIR OF THE McHULISHES.

I.

The consul for the United States of America at the port of St. Kentigern
was sitting alone in the settled gloom of his private office. Yet it was
only high noon, of a "seasonable" winter's day, by the face of the clock
that hung like a pallid moon on the murky wall opposite to him. What
else could be seen of the apartment by the faint light that struggled
through the pall of fog outside the lustreless windows presented the
ordinary aspect of a business sanctum. There were a shelf of fog-bound
admiralty law, one or two colored prints of ocean steamships under
full steam, bow on, tremendously foreshortened, and seeming to force
themselves through shadowy partitions; there were engravings of Lincoln
and Washington, as unsubstantial and shadowy as the dead themselves.
Outside, against the window, which was almost level with the street,
an occasional procession of black silhouetted figures of men and women,
with prayer-books in their hands and gloom on their faces, seemed to be
born of the fog, and prematurely to return to it. At which a conviction
of sin overcame the consul. He remembered