"A pretty woman--that Miss Crawford, decidedly ladylike--which the other is _not_, however pleasant a companion. I should as soon think of falling in love with a handsome bombshell, as with _her_. No knowing when she might explode. Now if I had met _Miss Crawford_ at Newport two years ago, who knows but affairs might have been different? Heigho!" And so Walter Harding went on to his business; while Tom Leslie, the member of the party who was "peckish," accompanied the two girls, who were decidedly hungry, to that over-gilt and tawdry caricature upon some of the palace-halls of the Old World, known as "Taylor's Saloon." CHAPTER XI. SOME REFLECTIONS ON COMPARATIVE CHARACTER--OF HOUSES AS WELL AS MEN--TEMPTATION, AND THE LEGENDS OF THE "LURLEY" AND THE "FROZEN HAND"--A LUNCH AT TAYLOR'S, AND AN ARRANGEMENT. In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and intention,--there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world, will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected--to have done much good and very little harm--and to have been acting from motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness, and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.