t to
tender my congratulations. Now I make certain that they are not
premature."

The poet laughed at this moment as a man may laugh in hell. He reeled.
His lean face momentarily contorted, and afterward the poet died.

"I am Lord Ufford," said Calverley aloud. "The person of a peer is
inviolable----" He presently looked downward from rapt gazing at his
wife.

Fresh from this horrible half-hour, he faced a future so alluring as by
its beauty to intimidate him. Youth, love, long years of happiness,
and (by this capricious turn) now even opulence, were the ingredients
of a captivating vista. And yet he needs must pause a while to think
of the dear comrade he had lost--of that loved boy, his pattern in the
time of their common youthfulness which gleamed in memory as bright and
misty as a legend, and of the perfect chevalier who had been like a
touchstone to Robert Calverley a bare half-hour ago. He knelt, touched
lightly the fallen jaw, and lightly kissed the cheek of this poor
wreckage; and was aware that the caress was given with more tenderness
than Robert Calverley had shown in the same act a bare half-hour ago.

Meanwhile the music of a country dance urged the new Earl of Ufford to
come and frolic where every one was laughing; and to partake with gusto
of the benefits which chance had provided; and to be forthwith as merry
as was decorous in a peer of England.

THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE

"_But after SHERIDAN had risen to a commanding position in the gay life
of London, he rather disliked to be known as a playwright or a poet,
and preferred to be regarded as a statesman and a man of fashion who
'set the pace' in all pastimes of the opulent and idle. Yet, whatever
he really thought of his own writings, and whether or not he did them,
as Stevenson used to say, 'just for fun,' the fact remains that he was
easily the most distinguished and brilliant dramatist of an age which
produced in SHERIDAN'S solemn vagaries one of its most characteristic
products._"

Look on this form,--where humor, quaint and sly,
Dimples the cheek, and points the beaming eye;
Where gay invention seems to boast its wiles
In amorous hint, and half-triumphant smiles.

Look on her well--does she seem form'd to teach?
Should you expect to hear this lady preach?
Is gray experience suited to her youth?
Do solemn sentiments become that mouth?

Bid her be grave, those lips should rebel prove
To every theme t