"I call that beastly snobbishness," said Leigh indignantly. "Whatever the man's former position may have been, he is now the mayor and entitled to all the honours of his office. On the same principle, the swells of forty years ago might have refused to recognise Lincoln as the President because he once split rails. And in fact they practically did. He had to be dead before they began to think that his rise in the world was a vindication of the equality of opportunity they pretended to believe in." "'Beastly' is perhaps the proper adjective under the circumstances," the other admitted, "but why should we lose sleep and shorten our days with fruitless indignation because men of a certain kind act as men of that kind always have acted? I prefer to look at the dramatic and humorous side of it, having, perhaps unfortunately, reached the speculative and acquiescent time of life. And the situation at the station was not without its amusing aspect. Mr. Emmet's well-known oratorical powers being thus curtailed, the President was delayed but a few minutes and then conducted to a carriage and driven about the city, attended by the honourable trio before mentioned. It is said by those who were within earshot that the President inquired for his friend the mayor, when he saw that he was to be deprived of his company. However that may be, I myself saw our tribune of the people riding by himself in solitary grandeur in the third carriage." At the memory of Emmet's discomfiture he interrupted his story to indulge in one of his silent laughs, an expression of mirth which, to his listener's excited mind, seemed almost an inhuman exhibition of his professed detachment from the passions about him. Perhaps, had he seen the dapper Cobbens and the lethargic Parr escorting the unsuspicious President to the carriage, and Emmet's expression as he found himself shoved into the third place in the procession, he might have appreciated his companion's sense of the ridiculous. But it was the inward struggle, not the outward aspect, that stirred his emotions. Emmet's most bitter strictures upon Cobbens and his kind were justified by this incident, and he imagined the mayor's sensations when he found himself out-generalled and humiliated. What would Felicity have felt, had she been present to witness the scene? How it might have affected her toward her husband, whether it would have aroused her to champion him the more, or whether it would have moved her to scorn of his stupidity in allowing himself to be put aside, Leigh could only guess; but his own instinct was to make common cause with the man that was wronged. "And who appointed the committee," he inquired, "if Emmet had nothing to do with it?"