himself--yes, and play Romeo, too! But as I live by bread, Stewart, my boy, there must be no Bessie in this case, or something will happen--something that would have happened five years ago had I not been as completely under the spell of your fascination as ever she was, poor little maid! Hello, here we are, and the train coming, thank the Lord!" Roberts hurried through the little waiting-room, past the small office, from which came the curt, short "tick-tick tack" that is as the voice of the ever-imperative telegraph wire, crossed the open space, tripping over the line of rails in the darkness, clambered up the steps, and entered the purgatorial heat of the car, made nauseating by the odor of banana and stale orange-peel, and dropped into a seat by the side of a sleeping man, only to spring up again when suddenly aware that he had sat upon a bottle. The movement aroused the sleeper, who, with his hat on the back of his head and a lock of hair clinging damply to his forehead, muttered apologies as he gathered up his overcoat out of the way. Having felt carefully in one of its outer pockets, he turned to Roberts with that loose smile of world-embracing geniality peculiar to the good-natured man who is "three sheets in the wind," and thickly remarked: "I's all right! Best kind of glass! I've sat on that flask dozen times myself 'nd never cracked it!" His head wobbled a moment, then he added, confidentially: "Soon's I can think--w-where in thunder I put cup--w-we'll have a drink together--like little men, eh? Why h-here it is, r-right in other pocket! Been a b-bear it might 'a' tore my g-gizzard out! Join me?" Jim Roberts glanced a moment down the brilliantly lighted, well-filled car, then clenched his hands and, drawing a long, almost sobbing breath--declined. "W-what's--w-what's reason you won't join me?" demanded the stranger, indignantly, yet showing at the same time a disposition to weep. "W-what have I done--say, now, w-what have I done? Slept with my m-mouth open, I s'pose? Slept out loud, too--very likely? But w-what of that? It isn't pretty, of course--but's no crime--eh?" He brought forth the metal cup and carefully wiped it out with a stubby forefinger, while he tearfully added that "the very dogs in the streets'd bark at him when they knew a gentleman had refused to drink with him!"