He did not say "good morning!" as a sign of dismissal, but his manner indicated as much, and the two friends left him with merely an additional nod. Harding was in decided dudgeon as the policeman of the bright blue cloth and the unimpeachable buttons accompanied them to the door, and muttered something very like "I'm d--d if I _do_ communicate with that office again, in a hurry!" Leslie, who had seen more of police operations, both abroad and at home, than his friend, and who had expected little or nothing else from the first,--kept his good humor admirably; and he bored Harding, before they had walked from the office to Broadway, with the information that that was about all the thanks any man ever received for attempting to do a service to government or individuals, and a relation of how at Naples a couple of years before, he had attempted to save the life of an Englishman threatened with assassination, and been arrested and very nearly imprisoned for an attempt to stab the man himself, with his penknife or tooth-pick--he never knew precisely which! The two friends were scarcely in the street, when the Superintendent called sharply: "Mr. Carpenter!" The Deputy was in the room in a moment. The Superintendent was writing a few words on a piece of paper. "You heard the story those men were telling?" "A part of it--perhaps all," answered the Deputy. "There may be something in it--I think there _is_," continued the Superintendent. "At all events, put those two houses"--handing him the slip of paper--"under close watch, and discover who enters and who leaves them, and at what hours. Put B---- and another good man in charge of the Prince Street house, and L---- and another good man at the one in East 5-- Street. That is all." The Deputy merely bowed and returned to his own table, beckoning to one of the policemen near the door and giving the necessary orders to carry out the directions of his superior. So that almost by the time the two friends reached Broadway, and certainly some time before Leslie concluded his illustrative narration of police management in Naples, the arrangement for which they had especially come, and which had been apparently denied, was already in active operation. The reasons which had induced the Superintendent to underrate to Harding and Leslie the importance of the intelligence he had just received, or which had led to so sudden a change of mind, will probably remain a mystery even after the profounder mysteries of governmental management during the war are brought into broad daylight. There is no Sphynx like your "man in authority," whether his reasons for silence be that he does not wish others to know his intentions, or that he _does not know them himself_.