Griswold saw the wonder and smiled. "No; I don't want to buy it," he explained, with the exact touch of familiarity which bridges all chasms. "But I'm just up from the coast, where they have a good bit of fever the year round, and it's as well to be on the safe side. May I trouble you to show me the way?" "Certainly," said the salesman, wondering no more; and when he had led the way to the boiler-room, and had seen his customer thrust the hand-bag well back among the coals in the furnace, he thought it a worthy precaution and one which, if generally practiced, would considerably accelerate the clothing trade. All traces of the deck-hand Gavitt, and of the Sonneschein planter-customer having been thus obliterated, there remained only the paying of his bill and the summoning of a cab. Oddly enough, the cab, when it came, proved to be a four-wheeler driven by a little, wizen-faced man whose thin, high-pitched voice was singularly familiar. "The Hotel Chouteau?--yis, sorr. Will you plaze hand me thim grips? I can't lave me harrses." The driver's excuse instantly tied the knot of recognition, and the man who had just cremated his former identities swore softly. "Beg your pardon, sorr; was ye spakin' to me?" "No; I was merely remarking that the world isn't as big as it might be." "Faith, then, it's full big enough for a man wid a wife and sivin childer hangin' to um. Get in, sorr, and I'll have you at the Chouteau in t'ree shakes av a dead lamb's tail." The little cabman was better than his word, but on the short drive to the hotel he found time to work out a small problem, not entirely to his satisfaction, but to at least a partial conclusion. "'Tis the divil's own self he is, and there's nothing left av him but thim eyes and that scar on his forrud, and his manner of spakin'. But thim I'd swear to if I'd live to be as old as Father M'Guinness--rest his sowl." XIV PHILISTIA All things considered, it was the Griswold of the college-graduate days--the days of the slender patrimony which had capitalized the literary beginning--who presented himself at the counter of the Hotel Chouteau at half-past nine o'clock on the evening of the _Belle Julie's_ arrival at St. Louis, wrote his name in the guest-book, and permitted an attentive bell-boy to relieve him of his two suit-cases. The clerk, a rotund little man with a promising bald spot and a permanent smile, had appraised his latest guest in the moment of book-signing, and the result was a small triumph for the Olive Street furnishing house. Next to the genuinely tailor-made stands the quality of verisimilitude; and the keynote of the clerk's greeting was respectful affability. "Glad to have you with us, Mr. Griswold. Would you like a room, or a suite?"