Magazine, a good story, too, and that always gives me a sinking feeling—­to think that after all these years I am still on the borderland of failure, and can never be sure of acceptance, even by the second-class periodicals for which I write.  However, in a day or two, I managed to unload “The Case against Phillpots” on somebody else, and off I started for the New Jersey coast with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket, and no end of plans for a long autumn holiday.

I never gave another thought to Grossensteck until one morning, as I was sitting on the veranda of my boarding-house, the postman appeared and requested me to sign for a registered package.  I opened it with some trepidation, for I had caught that fateful name written crosswise in the corner and began at once to apprehend the worst.  I think I have as much assurance as any man, but it took all I had and more, too, when I unwrapped a gold medal the thickness and shape of an enormous checker, and deciphered the following inscription: 

Presented to Hugo Dundonald Esquire for having With signal heroism, gallantry and presence of mind rescued On the night of June third, 1900 the life of Hermann Grossensteck from The dark and treacherous waters of the East River.

The thing was as thick as two silver dollars, laid the one on the other, and gold—­solid, ringing, massy gold—­all the way through; and it was associated with a blue satin ribbon, besides, which was to serve for sporting it on my manly bosom.  I set it on the rail and laughed—­laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks—­while the other boarders crowded about me; handed it from hand to hand; grew excited to think that they had a hero in their midst; and put down my explanation to the proverbial modesty of the brave.  Blended with my amusement were some qualms at the intrinsic value of the medal, for it could scarcely have cost less than three or four hundred dollars, and it worried me to think that Grossensteck must have drawn so lavishly on his savings.  It had not occurred to me, either before or then, that he was rich; somehow, in the bare cabin of the schooner, I had received no such impression of his means.  I had not even realised that the vessel was his own, taking it for granted that it had been hired, all standing, for a week or two with the put-by economies of a year.  His home address ought to have set me right, but I had not taken the trouble to read it, slipping it into my pocket-book more to oblige him than with any idea of following up the acquaintance.  It was one of the boarders that enlightened me.

“Grossensteck!” he exclaimed; “why, that’s the great cheap grocer of New York, the Park & Tilford of the lower orders!  There are greenbacks in his rotten tea, you know, and places to leave your baby while you buy his sanded sugar, and if you save eighty tags of his syrup you get a silver spoon you wouldn’t be found dead with!  Oh, everybody knows Grossensteck!”