Fred Hallowell was furious. This was the first time in his brief career as a newspaper man that anything like this had happened to him. He grew red in the face, his fingers twitched, and he felt as if he had never before been so grossly insulted. As he sat in his chair, fuming and wondering what he should do, Griggs, the fat and jolly political reporter of the _Gazette_, came up to him and said, laughing, “Well, you look as if you were plotting murder!” “I am—almost!” exclaimed Fred, and then he told Griggs all about what had happened. Griggs listened patiently, and at the end he chuckled to himself, and said: “Well, Hallowell, don’t waste any righteous wrath on any such stuff as that Baggold. I’ll tell you how to get even with him.” And then he talked for twenty minutes to the younger man. At the end of the conference Fred smiled and buttoned his coat, and hastened back to Cressy’s room in Houston Street. He found a Sister of Charity there nursing the sick woman. Cressy came to the door, pale and eager. “Well?” he said nervously. “Oh, it’s all right,” returned Fred, laughing. “I have just seen Mr. Baggold. He said his agent was perfectly right in having you dispossessed, because that was business; but when he heard what I had to say, he gave me this money.” And here Fred handed out the thirty dollars. “It is for you to pay the agent with, and then you can keep your room, and you will have ten dollars besides.” Cressy was speechless. The sick woman wept softly. The Sister said something in Latin, and the little girl just looked; she did not understand what it was all about. “You see,” said Fred to Cressy, “I suppose Mr. Baggold does not want his business to be interfered with by his sentiment.” And before Cressy could reply the reporter had slipped out of the door, and in a moment was hurrying down town to his office. The next morning—New-Year’s morning—the _Gazette_ contained a pretty little story of how a rich man, who had heard of the distress of a tenant, put his hand in his own pocket and paid his tenant’s rent to himself, so that the new year would begin well for him by having rents coming in at the very opening of the twelvemonth. “I’ll bet Baggold was surprised this morning when he read that,” gurgled the genial Griggs; “but it will do him more good than ten columns of abuse and exposure. So here’s a Happy New Year to him!” MR. O’LEARY’S SECOND LOVE By Charles Lever The play over, O’Leary charged himself with the protection of madam, while I enveloped Emily in her cashmere, and drew her arm within my own. What my hand had to do with hers I know not; it remains one of the unexplained difficulties of that eventful evening. I have, it is true, a hazy recollection of pressing some very taper and delicately formed fingers; and remember, too, the pain I felt next morning on awaking, by the pressure of a too tight ring, which had, by some strange accident, found its way to my finger, for which its size was but ill adapted.