“Be ready,” Mary whispered.  “Your name comes now; he has read eighteen.”

The chant ended.

“Next! next! next!” came volleying from all over the house.

Burgess put his hand into his pocket.  The old couple, trembling, began to rise.  Burgess fumbled a moment, then said: 

“I find I have read them all.”

Faint with joy and surprise, the couple sank into their seats, and Mary whispered: 

“Oh, bless God, we are saved!—­he has lost ours—­I wouldn’t give this for a hundred of those sacks!”

The house burst out with its “Mikado” travesty, and sang it three times with ever-increasing enthusiasm, rising to its feet when it reached for the third time the closing line—­

   “But the Symbols are here, you bet!”

and finishing up with cheers and a tiger for “Hadleyburg purity and our eighteen immortal representatives of it.”

Then Wingate, the saddler, got up and proposed cheers “for the cleanest man in town, the one solitary important citizen in it who didn’t try to steal that money—­Edward Richards.”

They were given with great and moving heartiness; then somebody proposed that “Richards be elected sole Guardian and Symbol of the now Sacred Hadleyburg Tradition, with power and right to stand up and look the whole sarcastic world in the face.”

Passed, by acclamation; then they sang the “Mikado” again, and ended it with—­

   “And there’s one Symbol left, you bet!”

There was a pause; then—­

A Voice.  “Now, then, who’s to get the sack?”

The Tanner (with bitter sarcasm).  “That’s easy.  The money has to be divided among the eighteen Incorruptibles.  They gave the suffering stranger twenty dollars apiece—­and that remark—­each in his turn—­it took twenty-two minutes for the procession to move past.  Staked the stranger—­total contribution, $360.  All they want is just the loan back—­and interest—­forty thousand dollars altogether.”

Many Voices [derisively.] “That’s it!  Divvy! divvy!  Be kind to the poor—­don’t keep them waiting!”

The Chair.  “Order!  I now offer the stranger’s remaining document.  It says:  ’If no claimant shall appear [grand chorus of groans], I desire that you open the sack and count out the money to the principal citizens of your town, they to take it in trust [Cries of “Oh!  Oh!  Oh!"], and use it in such ways as to them shall seem best for the propagation and preservation of your community’s noble reputation for incorruptible honesty [more cries]—­a reputation to which their names and their efforts will add a new and far-reaching lustre.” [Enthusiastic outburst of sarcastic applause.] That seems to be all.  No—­here is a postscript: