For in my humble opinion, for sound copper-bottomed snobbery, registered A1 at Lloyd’s, give me the free-born American citizen.

We travelled through the States, accordingly, for the next four months, from Maine to California, and from Oregon to Florida, under our own true names, “Confirming the churches,” as Charles facetiously put it—­or in other words, looking into the management and control of railways, syndicates, mines, and cattle-ranches.  We inquired about everything.  And the result of our investigations appeared to be, as Charles further remarked, that the Sabeans who so troubled the sons of Job seemed to have migrated in a body to Kansas and Nebraska, and that several thousand head of cattle seemed mysteriously to vanish, à la Colonel Clay, into the pure air of the prairies just before each branding.

However, we were fortunate in avoiding the incursions of the Colonel himself, who must have migrated meanwhile on some enchanted carpet to other happy hunting-grounds.

It was chill October before we found ourselves safe back in New York, en route for England.  So long a term of freedom from the Colonel’s depredations (as Charles fondly imagined—­but I will not anticipate) had done my brother-in-law’s health and spirits a world of good; he was so lively and cheerful that he began to fancy his tormentor must have succumbed to yellow fever, then raging in New Orleans, or eaten himself ill, as we nearly did ourselves, on a generous mixture of clam-chowder, terrapin, soft-shelled crabs, Jersey peaches, canvas-backed ducks, Catawba wine, winter cherries, brandy cocktails, strawberry-shortcake, ice-creams, corn-dodger, and a judicious brew commonly known as a Colorado corpse-reviver.  However that may be, Charles returned to New York in excellent trim; and, dreading in that great city the wiles of his antagonist, he cheerfully accepted the invitation of his brother millionaire, Senator Wrengold of Nevada, to spend a few days before sailing in the Senator’s magnificent and newly-finished palace at the upper end of Fifth Avenue.

“There, at least, I shall be safe, Sey,” he said to me plaintively, with a weary smile.  “Wrengold, at any rate, won’t try to take me in—­except, of course, in the regular way of business.”

Boss-Nugget Hall (as it is popularly christened) is perhaps the handsomest brown stone mansion in the Richardsonian style on all Fifth Avenue.  We spent a delightful week there.  The lines had fallen to us in pleasant places.  On the night we arrived Wrengold gave a small bachelor party in our honour.  He knew Sir Charles was travelling without Lady Vandrift, and rightly judged he would prefer on his first night an informal party, with cards and cigars, instead of being bothered with the charming, but still somewhat hampering addition of female society.