Neither will the reader be told of the various dishes or their garnishings.  These pages have so far been filled with little else beside eating and drinking, and with reason, too, for have not all the great things in life been begun over some tea-table, carried on at a luncheon, and completed between the soup and the cordials?  Kings, diplomats and statesmen have long since agreed that for baiting a trap there is nothing like a soup, an entree and a roast, the whole moistened by a flagon of honest wine.  The bait varies when the financier or promoter sets out to catch a capitalist, just as it does when one sets out to catch a mouse, and yet the two mammals are much alike—­timid, one foot at a time, nosing about to find out if any of his friends have had a nibble; scared at the least disturbing echo—­then the fat, toothsome cheese looms up (Breen’s Madeira this time), and in they go.

But if fuller description of this special bait be omitted, there is no reason why that of the baiters and the baited should be left out of the narrative.

Old Colonel Purviance, of the Chesapeake Club, for one—­a big-paunched man who always wore, summer and winter, a reasonably white waistcoat and a sleazy necktie; swore in a loud voice and dropped his g’s when he talked.  “Bit ’em off,” his friends said, as he did the end of his cigars.  He had, in honor of the occasion so contrived that his black coat and trousers matched this time, while his shoestring tie had been replaced by a white cravat.  But the waistcoat was of the old pattern and the top button loose, as usual.  The Colonel earned his living—­and a very comfortable one it was—­by promoting various enterprises—­some of them rather shady.  He had also a gift for both starting and maintaining a boom.  Most of the Mukton stock owned by the Southern contingent had been floated by him.  Another of his accomplishments was his ability to label correctly, with his eyes shut, any bottle of Madeira from anybody’s cellar, and to his credit, be it said, he never lied about the quality, be it good, bad or abominable.

Next to him sat Mason, from Chicago—­a Westerner who had made his money in a sudden rise in real estate, and who had moved to New York to spend it:  an out-spoken, common-sense, plain man, with yellow eyebrows, yellow head partly bald, and his red face blue specked with powder marks due to a premature blast in his mining days.  Mason couldn’t tell the best Tiernan Madeira from corner-grocery sherry, and preferred whiskey at any and all hours—­and what was more, never assumed for one instant that he could.

Then came Hodges, the immaculately dressed epicure—­a pale, clean-shaven, eye-glassed, sterilized kind of a man with a long neck and skinny fingers, who boasted of having twenty-one different clarets stored away under his sidewalk which were served to ordinary guests, and five special vintages which he kept under lock and key, and which were only uncorked for the elect, and who invariably munched an olive before sampling the next wine.  Then followed such lesser lights, as Nixon, Leslie and the other guests.