Into my pages, however, there have come others whose lives I should like to follow. Pearl says that, written, they would make dull reading. Possibly. Still it would seem that were Marian Speechless to disclose the inwardness of her intrigue to capture Williegilt Bumpschus and his millions we should have a narrative full of humor and pathos. We shall never know that story, even if it reaches a happy conclusion, for it will be told to the world in a notice of an engagement and a few newspaper paragraphs concerning the wedding. Gay Cecil Hash is an ideal hero, and his affair with the lovely Sunday-school teacher, his reform, his marriage, and withdrawal from worldly gayety would delight the most romantic reader. That book is closed. So with scores of others. But in one thing I feel that I have been fortunate--Mr. Mudison's memoirs have been rescued from oblivion. Aside from their interest as the story of a famous man and their historical value, I find that they round out my own pages, clearing up many points left obscure by my limited range of observation. His name occurs frequently in the notes made during the summer following my wedding, most conspicuously in August, when Mrs. Radigan, in a letter to Pearl, tells how she has refused him positively for the sixth and last time, for the simple reason that she still loves John devotedly. Then Mr. Mudison for a while disappears from our life, and though through the fall and winter I heard many rumors concerning him, I did not get at the truth until I undertook for him the task of editing his memoirs. A glance at the _Social Register_ gives at once an idea of the importance of my friend. After his name we find these extremely smart hieroglyphics: T., C., Cm., P., Wh., B., H., Ex., Sr., Sm., H. '90. This, of course, as everyone knows, means that his clubs are the Ticktock, the Cholmondeley, the Cosmopolitan, the Ping-pong, the Westbury Hunt, the Boxing, the Horseback, and the Exudo. Besides, he is a member of the Sons of the Rebellion and the Society of the Mexican War, while the last abbreviation stamps him a man of Harvard education. So Mudison is worth knowing. The greatest figures in the financial world, the political powers of the country, the artistic and literary celebrities, deem it a matter of pride to be seen in his company, for he is what so many millions strive to be and only a few hundred are--he is tremendously smart. I do not use the word in its vulgar sense. Mudison does not know a Greek root from an X-ray, but his family has been prominent in New York for fifty years, and its founder, the sheriff of the name, left a fortune that, though divided and subdivided, suffices to keep my friend in clothes and clubs.