smaller fry of ten and twelve, his tastes clinging long to the things of boyhood. He and I played together, after the darkening of his lip suggested the razor, and when the youths of his age were most of them acquiring top buggies, and thinking of the long Sunday-night drives with their girls. Jim preferred the boys, and the trade of the fisher and huntsman.

Why, in spite of parental opposition, I loved Jimmie, is not hard to guess. He had an odd and freakish humor, and talked more of Indian-fighting, filibustering in gold-bearing regions, and of moving accidents by flood and field, than of crops, live-stock, or bowery dances. He liked me just as did the older men who sent me to the National Convention,—in spite of my youth. He was a ne’er-do-weel, said my father, but I snared gophers and hunted and fished with him, and we loved each other as brothers seldom do.

At last, I began teaching school, and working my way to a better education than our local standard accepted as either useful or necessary, and Jim and I drifted apart. He had always kept up a voluminous correspondence with that class of advertisers whose black-letter “Agents Wanted” is so attractive to the farmer-boy; and he was usually agent for some of their wares. Finally, I heard of him as a canvasser for a book sold by subscription,—a “Veterinarians’ Guide,” I believe it was,—and report said that he was “making money.” Again I learned that he had established a publishing business of some kind; and, later, that reverses had forced him to discontinue it,—the old farmer who told me said he had “failed up.” Then I heard no more of him until that night of the convention, when I had the adventure with the Empress and Sir John, all unknown to them; and Jim made the ineffectual attempt to find me. His family had left the old neighborhood, and so had mine; and the chances of our ever meeting seemed very slight. In fact it was some years later and after many of the brave dreams of the youthful publicist had passed away, that I casually stumbled upon him in the smoking-room of a parlor-car, coming out of Chicago.

I did not know him at first. He came forward, and, extending his hand, said, “How are you, Al?” and paused, holding the hand I gave him, evidently expecting to enjoy a period of perplexity on my part. But with one good look in his eyes I knew him. I made him sit down by me, and for half an hour we were too much engrossed in reminiscences to ask after such small matters as business, residence, and general welfare.

“Where all have you been, Jim, and what have you been doing, since you followed off the ‘Veterinarians’ Guide,’ and I lost you?” I inquired at last.

“I’ve been everywhere, and I’ve done everything, almost,” said he. “Put it in the ‘negative case,’ and my history’ll be briefer.”

“I should regard organizing a flambeau brigade,” said I, “as about the last thing you would engage in.”

“Ah!” he replied, “His Whiskers at the hotel told you I called that time, did he? Well, I didn’t think he had the sense. And I doubted the memory on your part, and I wasn’t at all sure you were the real Barslow. But about the flambeaux. The fact is, I had some stock in the flambeau factory, and I was a rabid partisan of flambeaux. They seemed so patriotic, you know, so sort of ennobling, and so convincing, as to the merits of the tariff controversy!”

It was the same old Jim, I thought.

“We used to have a scheme,” I remarked, “our favorite one, of occupying an island in the Pacific,—or was it somewhere in the vicinity of the Spanish Main—”

“If it was the place where we were to make slaves of all the natives, and I was to be king, and you Grand Vizier,” he answered, as if it were a weighty matter, and he on the witness-stand, “it was in the Pacific—the South Pacific, where the whale-oil comes from. A coral atoll, with a crystal lagoon in the middle for our ships, and a fringe of palms along the margin—coco-palms, you remember; and the lagoon was green, sometimes, and sometimes blue; and the sharks never came over the bar, but the porpoises came in and played for us, and made fireworks in the phosphorescent waves....”

His eyes grew almost tender, as he gazed out of the window, and ceased to speak without finishing the sentence,—which it took me some minutes to follow out to the end, in my mind. I was delighted and touched to find these foolish things so green in his memory.

“The plan involved,” said I soberly, “capturing a Spanish galleon filled with treasure, finding two lovely ladies in the cabin, and offering them their liberty. And we sailed with them for a port; and, as I remember it, their tears at parting conquered us, and we married them; and lived richer than oil magnates, and grander than Monte Cristos forever after: do you remember?”

“Remember! Well, I should smile!”—he had been laughing like a boy, with his old frank laugh. “Them’s the things we don’t forget.... Did you ever gather any information as to what a galleon really was? I never did.”

“I had no more idea than I now have of the Rosicrucian Mysteries; and I must confess,” said I, “that I’m a little hazy on the galleon question yet. As to piracy, now, and robbers and robbery, actual life fills out the gaps in the imagination of boyhood, doesn’t it, Jim?”

“Apt to,” he assented, “but specifically? As to which, you know?”

“Well, I’ve had my share of experience with them,” I answered, “though not so much in the line of rob-or, as we planned, but more as rob-ee.”

Jim looked at me quizzically.

“Board of Trade, faro, or ... what?” he ventured.

“General business,” I responded, “and ... politics.”

“Local, state, or national?” he went on, craftily ignoring the general business.

“A little national, some state, but the bulk of it local. I’ve been elected County Treasurer, down where I live, for four successive terms.”

“Good for you!” he responded. “But I don’t see how that can be made to harmonize with your remark about rob-or and rob-ee. It’s been your own fault, if you haven’t been on the profitable side of the game, with the dear people on the other. And I judge from your looks that you eat three meals a day, right along, anyhow. Come, now, b’lay this rob-ee business (as Sir Henry Morgan used to say) till you get back to Buncombe County. As a former partner in crime, I won’t squeal; and the next election is some ways off, anyhow. No concealment among pals, now, Al, it’s no fair, you know, and it destroys confidence and breeds discord. Many a good, honest, piratical enterprise has been busted up by concealment and lack of confidence. Always trust your fellow pirates,—especially in things they know all about by extrinsic evidence,—and keep concealment for the great world of the unsophisticated and gullible, and to catch the sucker vote with. But among ourselves, my beloved, fidelity to truth, and openness of heart is the first rule, right out of Hoyle. With dry powder, mutual confidence, and sharp cutlasses, we are invincible; and as the poet saith,

“‘Far as the tum-te-tum the billows foam
Survey our empire and behold our home,’

or words to that effect. And to think of your trying to deceive me, your former chieftain, who doesn’t even vote in your county or state, and moreover always forgets election! Rob-ee indeed! rats! Al, I’m ashamed of you, by George, I am!“

This speech he delivered with a ridiculous imitation of the tricks of the elocutionist. It was worthy of the burlesque stage. The conductor, passing through, was attracted by it, and notified us that the solitude of