“No; the odor of onions is a little strong, isn’t it?” laughed the other. “Rather strange, by the by, some of nature’s best restoratives should be rank and noisome, while her poisons, like the Upas tree, are often sweet-smelling and agreeable?”
“Yes,” commented the land baron; “we make the worst faces over the medicines that do us the most good.”
“I presume,” said Straws, delighted at the prospect of an argument, and forgetting his curiosity over the other’s visit in this brief interchange of words, “nature but calls our attention to the fact that we may know our truest friends are not those with the sweetest manners.”
“Heaven forbid!” remarked Mauville. “But how are you getting on with your column? A surfeit of news and gossip, I presume? What a busy fellow you are, to be sure! Nothing escapes through your seine. Big fish or little fish, it is all one. You dress them up with alluring sauce.”
The bard shook his head.
“The net has been coming in dry,” he said gloomily. “But that’s the way with the fish. Sometimes you catch a good haul, and then they all disappear. It’s been bad luck lately.”
“Perhaps I can make a cast for you,” cried the patroon eagerly.
“And bring up what?” asked the hack.
“Something everybody will read; that will set the gossips talking.”