"_Mon Dieu!_" he exclaimed, and in an instant he and his friends were in an excited conversation that went at the rate of three hundred words a minute. Then the professor turned to Flannery. "I return," he said. "I have lost the most valued thing, the picture of the dear mamma. It is lost! It is picked of the pocket! Villains! I go to the police. I return." He did not wait for permission, but went, and that was the last Mike Flannery or Mrs. Muldoon ever saw of him. "An' t' think of me a free trader every day of me born life," said Mike Flannery that evening to Mrs. Muldoon, "but I be so no more. I see th' protection there is in th' protective tariff, Missus Muldoon, mam."