the dinosaur, dead as Desdemona! It is hard to figure them pacing beneath the cloudy porticos of that rather shoddy gilt Heaven in which they stoutly believed; but do they then wander the empty house of Dis, the idle, idle land? That were a doom at once unkind and unjust; rather let me fancy them beside the cheerful hearth in some comfortable limbo of good companionship and honest material pleasures; and if that too be a heresy and interdict, may the sod rest light where they sleep! Doctor Vardaman differed signally from his contemporaries in being not at all disposed to punch and pruriency. He would have reddened like a winter apple at Desdemona; and I am bound to say that here Colonel Pallinder met him on equal ground. It would be worth a moralist's while to inspect that stout piece of goods which is men's modesty beside the curiously flimsy fabric we call the modesty of women. "It's funny about men," Kitty Oldham confided to me once. "They can be as bad as they want to, and so, when they're good they seem an awful lot better than we are!" That may be the root of the matter; Kitty was undeniably astute and observant in various small and eminently feminine ways. "Nobody's all good anyhow," was another of her sayings, "nor all bad either. I know by myself!" Colonel Pallinder was an example, too, had we been aware of it. I have heard since from many indignant sufferers that he was a swindling adventurer; yet Bayard himself could not have walked more circumspectly in certain paths. He believed with all his heart that his wife and daughter were beautiful and gifted above the ordinary lot of mortals; I think they never had a wish ungratified. That hand of his which they tell me was so ruthlessly busy about other peoples' pockets, was forever emptying his own for the satisfaction of his womenkind; the trait does not make any the better man of him, but I am sure there have been worse. His behaviour toward Mrs. Botlisch was a lesson in forbearance and good manners. He did more than endure her; he showed her precisely the same chivalric deference as the rest of us. Perhaps he was a little florid in the Southern style, and as became a military man, but I think he was never ridiculous. It happened one day that an ill-advised or maybe merely ill-bred young man having blurted out some joke, high-flavoured, derogatory to Mrs. Botlisch, over one of those famous juleps in the Pallinder dining-room, the colonel rose up and with a severe countenance, laid his hand upon the joker's arm and jerked him upright without much ceremony. "Don't mind him, Colonel," interposed an onlooker. "He--he's not used to ladies' society, you know." "Sir," said the colonel sedately, "I should have said he was not used to the society of gentlemen!" and with that bundled the offender out of the room and the house. Nor did the action make him enemies; the rest of the male company expressed an unqualified approval.