they're not going to put a single thousand where they can't keep an eye on it, and see it breed. Fortunately Ozark Field went up to a hundred and seventeen instead of declining--I had confidence in it from the first. I bought at eighty, you know, so I'm pretty easy in my mind just now. If anybody were to ask me, though, I'd advise 'em to buy right now, for it won't ever take another drop, and I expect it'll be out of sight by the first of the year. Sam, chopped ice to Doctor Vardaman, and give Mr. Lewis a fresh glass." Archie Lewis sat looking into his tumbler with a rather queer expression as the waiter put it down before him after sundry dexterous operations with lemon-peel and bitters. Perhaps he was thinking that, for a man who made a point of never bringing his business-affairs home, it was truly remarkable how inevitably Colonel Pallinder worked around to them in the course of a conversation, no matter what the subject with which it started. Phosphate preferred, Lone Star common, Ozark Field--I could not begin to enumerate the "enterprises" in which the colonel and his capitalist friends were interested. The jargon of the market-place will always be jargon to me; I dare say I have not even quoted it aright. To this day I have never been able to find out what Phosphate was; it may have been mined, assayed, and smelted; or strained out of a river, or compounded with retorts and crucibles for all of me. But, although nobody knew anything about it, it was, as I have said, easy to see that Phosphate, in Templeton's formula, was a paying proposition. Look at the Pallinders; people couldn't live that way for nothing; this we said to one another, thinking it clinched the argument, and not knowing that people live "in magnificent state," for nothing. Who is so care-free, so luxurious in his habits, so open-handed and open-hearted as the man who never pays his debts? I know of no one more to be envied. One of the things the Pallinders did was to wall in with glass the large porch of the dining-room, install a heating-apparatus, and make a conservatory of it; this, too, although they had leased the Gwynne house for three years only, and Mrs. Pallinder was constantly complaining of their cramped and inconvenient quarters. "Of course," she said languidly, "one can't expect much of a house at such a low rent, but the colonel and I have _always_ had separate dressing-rooms. I thought I could make one do, for a while; but we're too crowded for any peace or comfort. The colonel wants to buy this house and add to it--but the end of it will be we'll have to build. The colonel keeps telling me to go to an architect or send for one--I shouldn't trust to anyone in this little town, you know. We'd have to select the building-lot, and get some man from Boston or New York to come out and look at it, and make the designs accordingly. But I'm so awfully lazy I can't make up my mind to all that bother and worry."