Still brooding over the enormous possibilities of the future, I stopped to rest and refresh myself in a modest and respectable little German beer-saloon, situated on the tabooed side of the barbed-wire fence--on the very border-land between low life and legitimate literary territory. It is an ordinary enough little place, with a bar and tables in front, and, in a space curtained off at the rear, a good-sized room often used for meetings and various forms of merrymaking. I never drop in for a glass of beer without thinking of a supper given in that back room a few years ago at which I was a guest; and on this particular night remembrance of that feast had a new significance, for it was blended with thoughts of Mr. Gilder’s journeyings. It was an actor who gave the supper--one of the most brilliant and talented of the many foreign entertainers who have visited our shores--and nearly every one of his guests had won some sort of artistic distinction. It is not the sort of a place that suggests luxurious feasting, but the supper which the worthy German and his wife set before us was, to me, a revelation of the resources of their national cookery. The occasion lingers in my memory, however, chiefly by reason of the charm and tact and brilliancy of the woman who sat in the place of honor--a woman whose name rang through Europe more than a quarter of a century ago as that of the heroine of one of the most sensational duels of modern times. Mr. Gilder has probably read about her in _The Tragic Comedians_, in which George Meredith has made her the principal character, and I am sure that if he--the _Century_ editor, not Mr. Meredith--had looked in upon our little supper party that night, he would have “trun up bote hands,” in the full sense of that unique and expressive term. Recollections of this feast brought to mind another which was given about two years ago fully half a mile to the south of the barbed-wire fence, and which is worthy of mention here because it taught me that some of the people bred in that region are vaguely conscious of a just claim that they have on the attention of story-writers and rather resent the fact that a place in our national literature has been denied them. The feast to which I allude was given on the occasion of a great wedding in a quarter of the town which plays an important part in civic and national affairs on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November--one in which the trade of politics ranks as one of the learned professions--a quarter where events date from the reigns of the different police captains.