which the whistling steam-tugs with their belching funnels, which are by slow degrees supplanting the romantic gondolier with his picturesque costume and his tender songs of sunny climes in the cab service of the Bride of the Adriatic, seem quite excusable, or, in any event, not so unforgivable as to constitute what the Americans would call an infernal shame. [At this point the reader was interrupted again. "Hold on a minute, Billy--will you, please?" said Tenafly Paterson. "Let's get this story straight. As I understand the first sentence somebody told a ghost-story, didn't he?" "Yes," replied Jones, a trifle annoyed. "And the second sentence means that those who heard it felt creepy?" "Precisely." "Then why the deuce couldn't you have said, 'When So-and-So had finished, the company shuddered'?" "Because," replied Jones, "I am reading a story which is constructed after the manner of a certain school. I'm not reading a postal-card or a cable message." The reader then resumed.] Miss Miller, to relieve the strain upon the nerves of those present, which was becoming unbearably tense--and, in fact, poor Maisie had burst into tears with the sheer terror of the climax, and had been taken off to be put to bed by Mrs. Brookenham, who, in spite of many other qualities, was still a womanly woman at heart, and not wholly deficient in those little tendernesses, those trifling but ineffable softnesses of nature, which are at once the chief source of woman's strength and of her weakness, a fact she was constantly manifesting to us during our stay at Lord Ormont's, and which we all remarked and in some cases commented upon, since the discovery had in it some of the qualities of a revelation--began to sing one of those extraordinary popular songs that one hears at the music-halls in London, and in the politer and more refined circles of American society, if indeed there may be said to be such a thing in a land so new as to be as yet mostly veneer, with little that is solid in its social substructure, beginning as its constituent factors do at the top and working downward, rather than choosing the more natural course of beginning at the bottom and working upward, and which must materially, one may think, affect the social solidarity of the nation by retarding its growth and in otherwise interfering with its healthy, not to say normal development, and which, as the words and import of it come back to me, was known by the rather vulgar and vernacular title of "All Coons Look Alike to Me," thus indicating that the life treated of in the melody, which was not altogether unmusical, and was indeed as a matter of fact quite fetching in its quality, running in one's ears for days and nights long after its first hearing, was that of the negro, and his personal likeness to his other black brethren in the eyes even of one who was supposed to have been at one