"Perfect und'--O me!" interrupted March, with a broken laugh and a frown. Proudfit liked his air and tried to reproduce it, but got his features tangled, rubbed his mouth, and closed his eyes. March stared into vacancy again. The tippler interposed with moist emotion. "John, we're landless! My plantation b'longs t' my wife. I can sympathize with you, John. As old song says, 'we're landless! landless!' _We_ are landless, John. But you have price--priceless 'dvant'ge over me in one thing, vice-president; you've still got yo' motheh!" "O!" groaned March, blazing up and starting away; but Proudfit clung. "My dea' boy! let me tell you, that tendeh little motheh's been a perfect hero! When I told her--in--in t-tears--how sorry I--and Garnet--and all of us--was,--'O Curl Prou'fit,' says she--with that ca'm, sweet, dizda-ainful smile of hers, you know--'it's no supprise to me; it's what I've expected from the beginning.'" LXXVI. AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS During the boom Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel--repaired, enlarged, repainted--had become Hotel Swanee. At the corner of the two streets on which it fronted he had added a square tower or "observatory." But neither guests nor "resi_dent_ers" had made use of it as he had designed. Its low top was too high to be reached with that Southern ease which Northern sojourners like, and besides, you couldn't see more than half the earth anyhow when you got up there. Early, therefore, it had been turned into an airy bed-chamber for Bulger. He, however was gone. He had left Suez for good and all on the same day on which John March arrived from abroad, being so advised to do by Captains Champion and Shotwell, who loved a good joke with a good fat coward to saddle it on, and who had got enough of Bulger on the day of the skirmish mentioned a page or two back. The tower room he left came to be looked upon as specially adapted for the sick, and here, some eleven or twelve months after the wreck of the Three Counties Land and Improvement Company, Limited, John March lay on his bed by night and sat on it by day, wasted, bright-eyed, and pale, with a corded frown forever between his brows save in the best moments of his unquiet sleep.