When the money touched fuzzy’s dingy palm his first instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind’s eye! He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids in gleaming glassware would be open to him. He followed James to the door. He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal for him to pass into the vestibule. Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs. Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire’s door and bethought himself. Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those wreaths and festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making the great hall gay—where had he seen such things before? Somewhere he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter, and—and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought he had heard before. Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course, it was Christmas—Fuzzy thought he must have been pretty drunk to have overlooked that. And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little, pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost—the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and “One-ear” Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer about the gate. With a more imperious gesture than James’s master had ever used or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the Christmas season. “It is cust—customary,” he said to James, the flustered, “when a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the season with the lady of the house. You und’stand? I shall not move shtep till I pass compl’ments season with lady the house. Und’stand?” There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and sent it through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a gentleman. He was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost. A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one. Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.