"Pooh!" returns the other, "you have only been from the Far West for three days." "True," remarks Lawrence. "Three days ago I was incompetent, but am not now. You see, I have been living in a mining camp in Southern Utah for the last year, where all women are scarce and none beautiful. For my first three days in New York, every woman I met on the streets seemed to me a houri. Now, however, I am beginning to discriminate. My taste has become normal, and I pronounce the young lady whose fan I picked up on the stairs a few moments ago, just what I have called her. Wouldn't you, if she had eyes----" "Oh, leave the eyes and devote yourself to the oysters," interjects the more practical Southmead. "You cannot have fallen in love with a girl while picking up her fan; besides, I have business to talk to you about this evening,--business upon which the success of your present transaction may depend." "You do not think the financial effort France is making to pay its war indemnity to Germany will stop the sale of my mine?" says the young man hurriedly, seating himself opposite his companion, and the two begin to discuss the charming _petit souper_, such as one bachelor gave to another in old Delmonico's on Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue before canvas-back ducks had become quite as expensive as they now are, and terrapin had become so scarce that mud-turtles frequently masquerade for diamond-backs, even in our most expensive restaurants. For this conversation and this supper took place in the autumn of 1871, before fashionable New York had moved above Twenty-third Street, when Neilson was about to enter into the glory of her first season at the Academy, when Capoul was to be the idol of the ladies, and dear little Duval was getting ready to charm the public by her polonaise in "Mignon." This year, 1871, had marked several changes in the business of these United States of America. During the War of the Confederacy, speculators, under the guise of Government contractors, had stolen great sums from Uncle Sam. In 1865 the Government changed its policy, and began to make presents of fortunes to speculators, thus saving them the trouble of robbing it. In 1868 it had just finished presenting a syndicate of Boston capitalists with the Union Pacific Railway, many millions of dollars in solid cash, and every alternate section of Government land for twenty miles on each side of their thousand miles of track. It had, also, been equally generous to five small Sacramento capitalists, and had presented them with the Central Pacific Railway, the same amount of Government land, and some fifty-five millions of dollars, and had received in return for all this--not even thanks.