is is my brother, Dan. Won't you come in, Mr. Clapp?"

"With all the pleasure in the world, for I have come in the character
of Santa Claus."

"Have you indeed?" thought Polly to herself; "we'll see about that!"
Perhaps there was something in her manner that betrayed her thoughts,
for her visitor said, with evident amusement:

"You take alarm too easily, Miss Polly. I should as soon think of
offering a gift in my own name to,--to any other extremely rich young
woman."

"I was glad to hear that your brother's name was Dan," he continued
with apparent irrelevance, as he took his seat. "And more delighted
still when I found out his middle name. Didn't it strike you," he
asked, turning abruptly to Dan, "that your employer, Mr. Jones, was
developing rather a sudden interest in your antecedents?"

"Yes," Polly thought, "he is pleased about something."

"Why, yes," Dan answered, with boyish bluntness. "But what do you know
about it?"

"Only that it was I that put Jones up to making his inquiries."

"You?" Dan looked half inclined to resent the liberty. But Polly saw
that there was something coming.

"Would you mind telling us what it's all about?" she asked. "You look
as if you knew something nice."

"I do; it's one of the nicest things I ever knew in my life. I didn't
tell you the other day, did I, that I had made most of my money in
mines?"

"No," said Polly, wondering why he should want to tell them how he
made "his old money."

"Well, that is the case; nearly all in one mine, too. It's a great
placer mine up north. I don't suppose you know much about placer
mines?"

Polly, disclaiming such knowledge, tried to look politely interested,
while Dan's interest, fortunately for his manners, was very genuine.
Was he not to be a mining engineer, and did he not want to learn all
he could?

"Well," Mr. Clapp went on, "a placer mine is one where the gold lies
embedded in the soil and has to be washed out, and if there doesn't
happen to be running water near by it costs an awful lot to bring it
in."

"Yes," said the polite Polly, with a vision of a fire-brigade running
about with buckets in their hands, as they used to do in Fieldham.

"What they call hydraulic mining," Dan put in.

"Yes, that's it. Big ditches to be dug, and all that sort of thing.
Well, this 'Big Bonus Mine' was discovered twenty years ago. A company
was started and the stock was put on the market at a dollar a share.
The management made a me