STARS OF THE NIGHT, ARE YOU WATCHING HERE?
The street is empty. Not a sound is heard. Not a footfall. Not a voice. The world is sleeping, dreaming of its own ambitions. Stars of the night, are you watching here?
"You said you t'ought I was pretty, Swiggsy, an' it made me so glad an' happy, 'cause I wants you to think I'm pretty—ah! where are you going! Come back! come back! come back! Don't leave me all alone, please, please don't, for I'm falling again, fast, faster all the time, an' I'll soon fall—"
She opened her eyes wide—wider than ever. She looked into Mr. Dootleby's face and smiled. She lifted her hand and dropped it heavily into his. Her head dropped on his shoulder. She had fallen—out of human sight!
V.
THE HON. DOYLE O'MEAGHER.
At this particular moment the Hon. Doyle O'Meagher is a busy man. Tammany Hall's nominating convention is shortly to be held, and Mr. O'Meagher is putting the finishing touches upon the ticket which he has decided that the convention shall adopt. The ticket, written down upon a sheet of paper, is before him, together with a bottle of whisky and a case of cigars, and the finishing touches consist of little pencil-marks placed opposite the candidates' names, indicating that they have visited Mr. O'Meagher and have duly paid over their several campaign assessments—a preliminary formality which Mr. O'Meagher enforces with strict impartiality. The amount of each assessment depends entirely upon Mr. O'Meagher's sense of the fitness of things. To dispute Mr. O'Meagher's sense in this particular is looked upon as treason and rebellion. In the case of the Hon. Thraxton Wimples, the intended candidate for the Supreme Court, the assessment is $20,000.
Mr. Wimples is a little man of profound learning and ancient lineage. Mr. O'Meagher is a man of indifferent learning and no lineage to speak of. Mr. Wimples's grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence, and had moved on three separate occasions that the Continental Congress do now adjourn, while no reason whatever existed, other than the one most obvious but least apt to occur to any one, for supposing that Mr. O'Meagher had ever had a grandfather at all. And yet, as Mr. Wimples, though on the threshold of great dignity and power, walks into Mr. O'Meagher's presence, he find himself all of a tremble, and glows and chills chase each other up and down his spinal column.
"Ah, Mr. O'Meagher," he says, "good-morning! Good-morning! Happy to see you so—er—well. Charming day, so warm for the—er—season."