it--_To be continued_.

BARON JAMES HARDEN-HICKEY

THIS is an attempt to tell the story of Baron Harden-Hickey, the Man Who
Made Himself King, the man who was born after his time.

If the reader, knowing something of the strange career of Harden-Hickey,
wonders why one writes of him appreciatively rather than in amusement,
he is asked not to judge Harden-Hickey as one judges a contemporary.

Harden-Hickey, in our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the
American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the
picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board
of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic
paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at
Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village
idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was a joke. The
people of our day had not the time to understand Harden-Hickey; they
thought him a charlatan, half a dangerous adventurer and half a fool;
and Harden-Hickey certainly did not under stand them. His last words,
addressed to his wife, showed this. They were: "I would rather die a
gentleman than live a blackguard like your father."

As a matter of fact, his father-in-law, although living under the
disadvantage of being a Standard Oil magnate, neither was, nor is, a
blackguard, and his son-in-law had been treated by him generously
and with patience. But for the duellist and soldier of fortune it was
impossible to sympathize with a man who took no greater risk in life
than to ride on one of his own railroads, and of the views the two men
held of each other, that of John H. Flagler was probably the fairer and
the more kindly.

Harden-Hickey was one of the most picturesque, gallant, and pathetic
adventurers of our day; but Flagler also deserves our sympathy.

For an unimaginative and hard-working Standard Oil king to have a
D'Artagnan thrust upon him as a son-in-law must be trying.

James A. Harden-Hickey, James the First of Trinidad, Baron of the
Holy Roman Empire, was born on December 8, 1854. As to the date all
historians agree; as to where the important event took place they
differ. That he was born in France his friends are positive, but at the
time of his death in El Paso the San Francisco papers claimed him as a
native of California. All agree that his ancestors were Catholics and
Royalists who left Ireland with the Stuarts when they sought refuge in