material for some of the best after-dinner stories he ever told. "By George," he used to say, "it got so that whenever one of my clerks came in and found a Gwynne lying in wait for Templeton and breathing fire and slaughter, he'd post somebody in the hall, and when Templeton came along: 'Hey, go slow, Temp., the enemy's poisoned the well!' and Templeton would shin for the street so fast you could play checkers on his coat-tail!" The fact is the poor old house was going to rack and ruin as rapidly as so solid and substantial a structure could go; the wonder was that Mrs. Peters had managed to get along at all in that comfortless monument to the Gwynne family-pride, but living there was probably a point of honour with her, that fantastic standard of honour, to which all the race of Gwynnes clung with a fanatic tenacity. No single member of the family could afford to spend any money on the house, and concerted action among fifteen or twenty Gwynne heirs was, as their agent speedily found out, next to an impossibility. The only thing about which they were in entire concord was the glory past, present, and to come of their name; they saw desecration in laying hands upon the torn and mildewed wall-paper, the blistered varnish, the leaking roofs of Uncle Samuel's shrine. It would have taken twelve or fifteen hundred dollars to put the place in order, at the least; and indeed as time went on, it promised to take more. The viewless forces of destruction invade an empty house, and lay it waste like a devastating army. "If they would just let me shingle the roof anyhow," said Templeton in despair. "But the only one of 'em all that has any sense is that young Peters fellow--not the queer one, you know, the one that's on the ranch in New Mexico, but that other, that nice tall red-haired boy. Trouble is, he's a minor. You just wait a couple of years or so till he's twenty-one and through college, and I'll bet he makes 'em all stand 'round!"