robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative
amateurs would have seen in it vast-reaching
plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic cupboards,
the guarded mysteries of half a century's inter-
national diplomacy. The amateurs would have
been wrong again. There was nothing behind
Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty
than a general determination to exact seven per
cent for his money, and some specific notions
about capturing certain brickyards which were
interfering with his quarry-sales. But Octavius
watched him shamble along its sidewalks quite
as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday
might have watched Metternich.

Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort, -- a florid,
stout, and sandy man, who spent most of his life
driving over evil country roads in a buggy, secur-
ing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied
lines of farm utensils. This practice had given
him a loud voice and a deceptively hearty manner,
to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer,
which he pursued at the Board of Trade meetings
every Monday afternoon, had added a consider-
able command of persuasive yet non-committal
language. To look at him, still more to hear him,
one would have sworn he was a good fellow, a
trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at
bottom. But the County Clerk of Dearborn
County could have told you of agriculturists who
knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience,

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