Here communed we three, blown from various winds, to this local Bohemia: Max, native of the free German City of Frankfort, operatic manager in Rio Janeiro, musician in New York, Denver resident by adoption, Philadelphia newspaperman by preference; Breffny, born in a Spanish village, reared in Continental countries, professedly an Irishman, but more than half-Latin in temperament and appearance, a cyclopedia for the benefit of his friends, and myself. The talk ran to the imposture recently attempted by young Mr. Herdling, who claimed that the dead body found at Tarrytown was that of his wife. “A very touching fake,” said Max. “Yes; thanks to the skill of the reporters who wrote up his story,” cried Breffny. “We visited many morgues in search of her, Louise and I,” said I, quoting the most effective passage of the narrative. “I did know of one case of a husband starting off at random to find his runaway wife,” observed Breffny. “As there's yet an hour to midnight, we have time for one of your stories.” “I can tell this in five minutes. All I know of the story is the beginning. No one ever heard of the end. It was like this: “When I lived in Glasgow, I knew a young fellow there who was timekeeper in a shipyard. He was a very quiet, pleasant boy, so bashful that I used to wonder how he had ever summoned the courage to propose to the pretty Scotch girl who was his wife. As I got to know more of the pair, I divined the secret. Although poor, he was of good Glasgow parentage, while the wife had been a country girl so eager to get to the city that she had courted him while he was on a visit to the village in which she had lived. She had merely used him as a means for finding the life for which she had longed. “How much he really loved her was never suspected until he came home one evening and found that she had run away with the youngest son of one of the proprietors of the shipyard. “He learned within a week that they had sailed for America. He packed a valise, took the money that he had saved, and started out. “'But where are you going to look for them?' I asked him. “'To America,' he said, turning toward me, his face drawn and gaunt with the grief that he had survived. “'But America is a vast country.' “'I will hunt till I find her.' “'And when you find her--you will not kill her, surely!' “'I will try to get her to come back to me.' “He took passage in the steerage, and I do not know what happened to him after that.” Each of us hid his emotions in his beer-mug. Then Max ordered fresh mugs, and said that Breffny's story recalled a somewhat similar thing that he had witnessed in Denver. “When I was a reporter out there, I was standing one evening in front of a hotel. A crowd collected to see the body of a guest brought out and placed upon an ambulance. “'Where are you taking him, and what is it?' I asked the driver. “'To the lazaretto. Smallpox.'”