On the steps of the police-court, as we emerged triumphant, Lord Southminster met us--still radiant as ever. He seemed wholly unaware of the depths of his iniquity: a fresh dose of brandy had restored his composure. "Look heah," he said, "Harold, your wife has bested me! Jolly good thing for you that you managed to get hold of such a clevah woman! If you hadn't, deah boy, you'd have found yourself in Queeah Street! But, I say, Lois--I call yah Lois because you're my cousin now, yah know--you were backing the wrong man aftah all, as I told yah. For if you'd backed _me_, all this wouldn't have come out; you'd have got the tin and been a countess as well, aftah the governah's dead and gone, don't yah see. You'd have landed the double event. So you'd have pulled off a bettah thing for yourself in the end, as I said, if you'd laid your bottom dollah on me for winnah!" [Illustration: "HAROLD, YOUR WIFE HAS BESTED ME."] Higginson is now doing fourteen years at Portland; Harold and I are happy in the sweetest place in Gloucestershire; and Lord Southminster, blissfully unaware of the contempt with which the rest of the world regards him, is shooting big game among his "boys" in South Africa. Indeed, he bears so little malice that he sent us a present of a trophy of horns for our hall last winter. _A Town in the Tree-Tops._ By Ellsworth Douglass. Everybody at the _pension_ had heard it, but Bayly has a circumstantial and picturesque manner of narration, which gives old stories a new interest. "Wasn't it your American millionaire, Mr. Waldorf Astor," he said, addressing me, "who made a wager that he would comfortably seat thirty-two guests around the stump of a California big tree? And didn't he do it? Brought a slice off the tree-stump more than 6,000 miles, and had a grand dinner on it in London?" "I must say I like your big tree stories better than your big tree wines," put in Gaillet, a dashing young Frenchman, who spoke English fluently; "but I don't think all that is so wonderful. I can show you a place, within less than an hour of Paris, where more than thirty-two persons can dine around comfortable tables high up in the branches of a single tree!" "That sounds interesting, Gaillet; to me it smells like 'good copy.' Eating up in trees might make some novel photographs; what do you say, Bayly?" I purposely touched the young Englishman on his hobby. He was an amateur photographer of the virulent and persistent type, and had recently infected me with the contagion. "If the sun looks promising we will ride down there on our wheels to-morrow and have a look at them," he replied. "Can you go with us and show us the way, Gaillet?"