By RUTH McENERY STUART

One could see at a glance that they were gentlemen as they strolled leisurely along, side by side, through Madison Square, on Christmas morning.

A certain subtle charm—let us call it a dignified aimlessness—hung about them like an easy garment, labelling them as mild despisers of ambitions, of goals, of destinations, of conventionalities.

The observer who passed from casual contemplation of their unkempt locks to a closer scrutiny perceived, even in passing them, that their shoes were not mates, while the distinct bagging at the knees of their trousers was somewhat too high in one case, and too low in the other, to encompass the knees within which were slowly, but surely, gaining tardy secondary recognitions at points more or less remote from the first impressions.

One pair was a trifle short in the legs, while the other—they of the too-low knee-marks—were turned up an inch or two above the shoes: a style which in itself may seem to savor of affectation, and yet, taken with the wearer on this occasion, dispelled suspicion.

It seemed rather a cold day to sit on a bench in Madison Square, and yet our two gentlemen, after making a casual tour of the walks, sat easily down; and, indeed, though passers hurried by in heavy top-coats and furs, it seemed quite natural that these gentlemen should be seated.

One or two others, differing more or less as individuals from our friends, but evidently members of the same social caste, broadly speaking, were also sitting in the square, apparently as oblivious to the cold as they.

“The hardest thing to bear,” the taller one, he of the short trousers, was saying, as he dropped his shapely wrist over the iron arm of the bench, “the hardest thing for the individual, under the present system, is the arbitrariness of the assignments of life. The chief advantage of the Bellamy scheme seems to me to be in its harmonious adjustments, so to speak. Every man does professionally what he can best do. If you and I had been reared under that system, now—”

“What, think you, would Bellamy the prophet have made of you, Humphrey?”

“Well, sir, his government would have taken pains to discover and develop my tendency, my drift—”

“Ah, I see. I should judge that nature had endowed you with a fine bump of drift, Humphrey. But has it not been rather well cared for? The trouble with drifting is, so say the preachers, that it necessarily carries one downstream.”

“To the sea, the limitless, the boundless, the ultimatum—however, this is irrelevant and frivolous. I am serious—and modest, I assure you—when I speak of my gifts. I have, as you know, a pronounced gift at repartee. Who knows what this might have become under proper development? But it has been systematically snubbed, misunderstood, dubbed impertinence, forsooth.”

“If I remember aright, it was your gift of repartee that—wasn’t it something of that sort which severed your connection with college?”

“Yes, and here I am. That’s where the shoe pinches. Ha! and by way of literal illustration, speaking of the mal-adjustments of life, witness this boot.”

The speaker languidly extended his right foot.

“The fellow who first wore it had bunions, blast him, and I come into his bunion-bulge with a short great toe. As a result, here I am in New York in December, instead of absorbing sunshine and the odor of violets in Jackson Square in New Orleans, with picturesqueness and color all about me. No man could start South with such a boot as that.

“I do most cordially hope that the beastly vulgarian who shaped it has gone, as my friend Mantalini would express it, ‘to the demnition bow-wows.’ You see the beauty of the Bellamy business is that all callings are equally worthy. As a social factor I should have made a record, and would probably have gone into history as a wit.”

“Condemn the history! You’d have gone into life, Humphrey. That’s enough. You’d have gone into the home—into your own bed at night—into dinner in a dress-coat—into society, your element—into posterity in your brilliant progeny, paterfamilias—”

“Enough, Colonel. There are some things—even from an old comrade like yourself—”

“Beg pardon, Humphrey. No offence meant, I assure you.

“It’s only when life’s fires are burning pretty low that we may venture to stir the coals and knock off the ashes a little.

“For myself, I don’t mind confessing, Humphrey, that there have been women—Don’t start; there isn’t even a Yule-log smouldering on my heart’s hearth to-day. I can stir the smoking embers safely. I say there have been women—a woman I’ll say, even—a nursemaid, whom I have seen in this park—a perfect Juno. She was well-born I’d swear, by her delicate ears, her instep, her curved nostrils—”

“Did you ever approach your goddess near enough to catch her curved articulation, Colonel? Or doubtless it flowed in angles, Anglo-Saxon pura.”

“You are flippant, Humphrey. I say if this woman had had educational advantages and—and if my affairs had looked up a little, well—there’s no telling! And yet, to tell you this to-day does not even warm my heart.”

“Nor rattle a skeleton within its closet?”

“Not a rattle about me, sir, excepting the rattle of these beastly newspapers on my chest. Have a smoke, Humphrey?”

The Colonel presented a handful of half-burned cigar-stubs.

“No choice. They’re all twenty-five-centers, assorted from a Waldorf lot.”

“Thanks.”

Humphrey took three. The Colonel, reserving one for his own use, dropped the rest into his outer pocket.

And now eleven men passed, smoking, eleven unapproachables, before one dropped a burning stump.

As Humphrey rose and strode indolently forward to secure the fragment, there was a certain courtliness about the man that even a pair of short trousers could not disguise. It was the same which constrains us to write him down Sir Humphrey.

“I never appropriate the warmth of another man’s lips,” said he, as, having first presented the light to his friend, he lit a fragment for himself. Then, pressing out the fire of the last acquisition, he laid it beside him to cool before adding it to his store.

“Nor I,” responded the Colonel—”at least, I never did but once. I happened to be walking behind General Grant, and he dropped a smoking stub—”

“Which you took for Granted—”

“If you will, yes. It was a bit sentimental, I know, but I rather enjoyed placing it warm from his lips to mine. It was to me a sort of calumet, a pipe of peace, for rebel that I was, and am, I always respected Grant. Then, too, I fancied that I might deceive the fragment into surrendering its choicest aroma to me, since I surprised it in the attitude of surrender, and I believe it did.”

“Sentimental dog that you are!” said Sir Humphrey, smiling, as he inserted the remaining bit of his cigar into an amber tip and returned it to his lips.

“You have never disclosed to me, Humphrey, where you procured that piece of bric-à-brac?”

“Haven’t I? That is because of my Bostonian reticence. No secret, I assure you. I found it, sir, in the lining of this coat. The fair donor of this spacious garment on one occasion, at least, gave a tip to a beggar unawares.”

“Exceptional woman. Seems to me the exceptional beggar would have returned the article.”

“Exceptional case. Didn’t find the tip for a month. I was in Mobile at the time. I should have written my benefactress had stationery been available and had I known her name. When I returned to New York in the spring there was a placard on the house. Otherwise I should have restored the tip, and trusted to her courtesy for the reward of virtue.”

“You have forgotten that that commodity is its own reward?”

“Yes, and the only reward it ever gets, as a New Orleans wit once remarked. Hence, here we are. However, returning to my fair benefactress, I haven’t much opinion of her. Any woman who would mend her husband’s coat-sleeve with glue—look at this! First moist spell, away it went. Worst of it was I happened to have no garment under it at the time. However, the incident secured me quite a handsome acquisition of linen. Happened to run against a clever little tub-shaped woman whose ample bosom, I take it, was ordered especially for the accommodation of assorted sympathies. She, perceiving my azure-veined elbow, invited me to the dispensing-room of the I. O. U. Society, of which she was a member, and presented me with a roll of garments, and—would you believe it?—there wasn’t a tract or leaflet in the bundle—and as to my soul, she never mentioned the abstraction to me. Now, that is what I call Christianity. However, I may come across a motto somewhere, yet. Of course, at my first opportunity, I put on those shirts—one to wear, and the other three to carry. So I’ve given them only a cursory examination thus far.”

“Which one do you consider yourself wearing, Humphrey, and which do you carry?”

“I wear the outside one, of course—and carry the others.”

“Do you, indeed? Well, now, if I were in the situation, I should feel that I was wearing the one next my body—and carrying the other three.”

“That’s because you are an egotist and can’t project yourself. I have the power the giftie gi’e me, and see myself as others see me. How’s that for quick adaptation?”

“Quite like you. If the Scotch poet had not been at your elbow with his offering, no doubt you’d have originated something quite as good. So you may be at this moment absorbing condensed theology, nolens volens.”

“For aught I know, yes, under my armpits. However, I sha’n’t object, just so the dogmas don’t crowd out my morals. My moral rectitude is the one inheritance I proudly retain. I’ve never sold myself—to anybody.”

“Nor your vote?”

“Nor my vote. True, I have accepted trifling gratuities on election occasions; but they never affected my vote. I should have voted the same way, notwithstanding.”

“Well, sir, I am always persuaded to accept a bonus on such occasions for abstaining. I have been under pay from both parties, each suspecting me of standing with the opposition. Needless to say, I have religiously kept my contract. I never vote. It involves too much duplicity for a man of my profession.”

“Not necessarily. I resided comfortably for quite a period in the basement of the dwelling of a certain political leader in this metropolis, once. He wished to have me register for his butler, but I stickled for private secretary, and private secretary I was written, sir, though I discovered later that the rogue had registered me as secretary to his coachman. However, the latter was the better man of the two—dropped his h’s so fast that his master seemed to feel constrained to send everything to H—— for repairs.”

“What else could you expect for a man of aspirations?”

“By thunder, Humphrey, that’s not bad. But do you see, by yon clock, that the dinner-hour approacheth?”

The Colonel took from his waistcoat-pocket two bits of paper.

“Somehow, I miss Irving to-day. There’s nothing Irving enjoyed so much as a free dinner-ticket. I see the X. Y. Z.’s are to entertain us at 1 P.M., and the K. R. G.’s at 4.”

Sir Humphrey produced two similar checks.

“Well, sir, were Irving here to-day I’d willingly present him with this Presbyterian chip. There are some things to which I remain sensitive, and I look this ticket in the face with misgivings. It means being elbowed by a lot of English-slaying mendicants in a motto-bedecked saloon, where every bite at the Presbyterian fowl seems a confession of faith that that particular gobbler, or hen, as the case may be, was fore-ordained, before the beginning of time, to be chewed by yourself—or eschewed, should you decline it. Somehow theology takes the zest out of the cranberries for me. However, de gustibus—”

“Well, sir, I am a philosopher, and so was Irving. Poor Irving! He was never quite square. It was he, you know, who perpetrated that famous roach fraud that went the rounds of the press. I’ve seen him do it. He would enter a restaurant, order a dinner, and, just before finishing, discover a huge roach, a Croton bug, floating in his plate. Of course the insects were his own contribution, but the fellow had a knack of introducing them. He could slip a specimen into his omelette soufflé, for instance, dexterously slicing it in half with his knife, with a pressure that left nothing to be desired. The interloper, compactly imbedded, immediately imparted such an atmosphere to his vicinity that even the cook would have sworn he was baked in. I blush to say I was Irving’s guest on one such occasion.”

“And Sir Roach paid for both dinners?”

“Bless you, yes. Sir Roach, F.R.S. (fried, roasted, or stewed). Indeed, his hospitality did not end here. We were pressed to call again, and begged not to mention the incident. Of course, this was in our more prosperous days, before either of us had taken on the stamp of our exclusiveness. Even Irving would hesitate to try it now, I fancy.”

“Poor Irving! A good fellow, but morally insane. In Baton Rouge now, I believe?”

“Yes. He changed overcoats with a gentleman.

“I wonder how the cooking is in that State institution, Humphrey? Irving is such an epicure—”

“Oh, he’s faring well enough, doubtless. Trust those Louisianians for cookery. When Irving is in New Orleans there are special houses where he drops in on Fridays, just for court-bouillon. I’ve known him to weed a bed of geraniums rather than miss it.”

“Such are the vicissitudes of pedestrianism. Well, tempus fugit; let us be going. We have just an hour to reach our dining-hall. Here come the crowd from church. The Christmas service is very beautiful. Do you recall it, Humphrey?”

“Only in spots—like the varioloid.”

They were quite in the crowd now, and so ceased speaking, and presently the Colonel was considerably in advance of his companion. So it happened that he did not see Humphrey stop a moment, put his foot on a bit of green paper, drop his handkerchief, and in recovering it gather the crumpled bill into it.

Thus it came about that when Sir Humphrey overtook his friend, and, tapping him upon the shoulder, invited him to follow him into a famous saloon, the Colonel raised his eyes in mild surprise.

Sir Humphrey paid for the drinks with a ten-dollar note, and then the two proceeded to the side door of a well-known restaurant.

“Private dining-room, please,” he said, and he dropped a quarter into the hands of the servant at the door as he led the way.

It was two hours later when, having cast up his account from the bill of fare, Sir Humphrey, calling for cigars, said: “Help yourself, Colonel. If my arithmetic is correct, we shall enjoy our smoke, have a half dollar for the waiter, and enter the Square with a whole cigar apiece in our breast pockets—at peace with the world, the flesh, and his Satanic majesty. Allow me to give you a light.”

He handed the Colonel one of the free dinner-tickets of the X. Y. Z. Society.

“The Presbyterian blue-light I reserve for my own use. Witness it burn.

“Well, Colonel, I hope you have enjoyed your dinner?”

“Thoroughly, sir, thoroughly. This is one of the many occasions in my life, Humphrey, when I rejoice in my early good breeding. Were it not for that, I should feel constrained to inquire whom you throttled and robbed in crossing Fifth Avenue, two hours ago, during the forty seconds when my back was turned.”

“And my pious rearing would compel me to answer, ‘No one.’

“The wherewithal to procure this Christmas dinner dropped straight from heaven, Colonel. I saw it fall, and gratefully seized it, just in the middle of the crossing.”

“Thanks. I have taken the liberty of helping myself to the rest of the matches, Humphrey.”

“Quite thoughtful of you. We’ll use one apiece for the other cigars. Do you know I really enjoyed the first half of that smoke. It was quite like renewing one’s youth.”

And so, in easy converse, they strolled slowly down Fifth Avenue.

As Sir Humphrey hesitated in his walk, evidently suffering discomfort from his right boot, he presently remarked:

“I say, Colonel, I think I’ll call around tomorrow at a few of my friends’ houses, and see if some benevolent housewife won’t let me have a shoe for this right foot.”

“Or why not try your cigar on the ebony janitor of the apartment-house across the way. He has access to the trash-boxes, and could no doubt secure you a shoe—maybe a pair.”

“Thanks, Colonel, for the suggestion, but there are a few things I never do. I never fly in the face of Providence. I shall smoke that cigar intact.”

And they walked on.