Throughout our conversation Bismarck repeatedly expressed his pleasure at the friendly relations existing between him and the German Liberals, some of whom had been prominent in the revolutionary troubles of 1848. He mentioned several of my old friends, Bucher, Kapp, and others, who, having returned to Germany, felt themselves quite at home under the new conditions and had found their way open to public positions and activities of distinction and influence, in harmony with their principles. As he repeated this, or something like it, in a manner apt to command my attention, I might have taken it as a suggestion inviting me to do likewise. But I thought it best not to say anything in response. Our conversation had throughout been so animated that time had slipped by us unaware, and it was again long past midnight when I left. My old friends of 1848 whom I met in Berlin were of course very curious to know what the great man of the time might have had to say to me, and I thought I could without being indiscreet communicate to them how highly pleased he had expressed himself with the harmonious cooperation between him and them for common ends. Some of them thought that Bismarck's conversion to liberal principles was really sincere. Others were less sanguine, believing as they did that he was indeed sincere and earnest in his endeavor to create a united German empire under Prussian leadership; that he would carry on a gay flirtation with the Liberals so long as he thought that he could thus best further his object, but that his true autocratic nature would assert itself again and he would throw his temporarily assumed Liberalism overboard as soon as he felt that he did not need its support any longer, and especially when he found it to stand in the way of his will. THE FOREHANDED COLQUHOUNS BY MARGARET WILSON ILLUSTRATIONS BY A. E. CEDERQUIST I "Perhaps I'm too old to be wearing such things, but I love bright colors, and there's not a bit of use denying it." Mary Ann gathered one end of the fancy tartan into a handful, and looked approvingly at its soft, heavy folds. "Particularly at this time of year. It's warming to the blood on a cold autumn day just to see a dress like this on the street. I always did like a good rich tartan. It becomes me, too. Look, Selina'n'Jane." She held the dress material against one cheek, and her sisters looked--but somehow failed to see what a pleasing picture she made. She had just come in from shopping and had not yet removed her hat, and its trimming of foliage repeated the colors of her face--autumnal tints of red and bronze and healthy yellow. She, the eldest of the family and the only unmarried one, was forty-five, but she was rosy and fat and matronly, while her sisters were pinched and anemic. They were old maids by nature, she by chance. "It becomes you well enough, but under the circumstances," Jane said, exchanging glances with Selina, "it seems a pity to buy all these things."