till
it dizzied and saddened him. What did he count here?

Presently he returned to the desk with an inquiry concerning his room.
There had been a shift of clerks since his arrival, and the newcomer
asked his name, his impassive scrutiny travelling from the man to the
signature, and from the signature back to the man. A youngish person,
looking the successful broker or lawyer, who had been chatting with the
clerk, saw the movement and imitated it as Shelby walked away.

"And you said there were no celebrities," he bantered.

The clerk shrugged listlessly.

"The 'Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby,'" read the reporter. "There ought to be
a story in a man who has the nerve to subscribe himself like that in a
New York hotel. What do you know about his pathetic case?"

"Stranger to me," the bored one unbent to say.

The questioner spied a fellow-reporter whose specialty was politics.

"Billy," he demanded, pointing to the register, "who is the Hon. Calvin
Ross Shelby?"

"Candidate for Congress in the Demijohn District," returned the
political expert, promptly, smiling at the signature. "Rather
picturesque fight the honorable is having. He's bucking a fusion
opposition headed by the author of that popular poem about a statue.
Where is he? I want to see him. There's nothing else doing here."

They pursued the stranger down the corridor, overhauling him at the
entrance of the cafe.

"The Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby, I believe," said the political reporter,
lifting his hat, and naming the newspaper he represented. His
companion, who looked like a broker, but whose present mission was to
screw copy out of hotel arrivals, followed his example, and the group
was almost immediately increased by three more well-dressed
cosmopolitans with ingratiating manners and a scent for news.

Five New York reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy
pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby
almost to pass belief. Somehow he rallied.

"Gentlemen," he beamed, "I'm glad to see you. Have a drink."

No liquor distilled could add to Shelby's intoxication. It was not
reporting, this swift interchange of trenchant thought between men of
the world; or if reporting, a sublimated sort, free of note-books and
the disconcerting trademarks of the guild as he had known it elsewhere.

"I can't understand the hostility felt by some public men for the
press," he remarked, thumbs in armholes, coat lapels thrown beni