“Am I excusable?” she said to me—­adorable petitioner that she became.  “It’s—­it’s Mr. Lathrop.  I wonder if it really wasn’t the money—­I wonder, if after all, he—­”

Of course, I was invited to the wedding.  After the ceremony I dragged Lathrop aside.

“You are an artist,” said I, “and haven’t figured out why Maggie Brown conceived such a strong liking for Miss Bates—­that was?  Let me show you.”

The bride wore a simple white dress as beautifully draped as the costumes of the ancient Greeks.  I took some leaves from one of the decorative wreaths in the little parlour, and made a chaplet of them, and placed them on nee Bates’ shining chestnut hair, and made her turn her profile to her husband.

“By jingo!” said he.  “Isn’t Ida’s a dead ringer for the lady’s head on the silver dollar?”

V

“NEXT TO READING MATTER”

He compelled my interest as he stepped from the ferry at Desbrosses Street.  He had the air of being familiar with hemispheres and worlds, and of entering New York as the lord of a demesne who revisited it in after years of absence.  But I thought that, with all his air, he had never before set foot on the slippery cobblestones of the City of Too Many Caliphs.

He wore loose clothes of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear.  Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen.  His ugliness was less repellent than startling—­arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay.  So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman’s vase.  As he afterward told me, his name was Judson Tate; and he may as well be called so at once.  He wore his green silk tie through a topaz ring; and he carried a cane made of the vertebrae of a shark.

Judson Tate accosted me with some large and casual inquiries about the city’s streets and hotels, in the manner of one who had but for the moment forgotten the trifling details.  I could think of no reason for disparaging my own quiet hotel in the downtown district; so the mid-morning of the night found us already victualed and drinked (at my expense), and ready to be chaired and tobaccoed in a quiet corner of the lobby.

There was something on Judson Tate’s mind, and, such as it was, he tried to convey it to me.  Already he had accepted me as his friend; and when I looked at his great, snuff-brown first-mate’s hand, with which he brought emphasis to his periods, within six inches of my nose, I wondered if, by any chance, he was as sudden in conceiving enmity against strangers.