parties.

"I did not quite mean that," replied Dawson. "Those closing ceremonies
are still strictly private. But you should see the chase through to a
finish. You are a newspaper man, and should be eager for new
experiences."

"I will come," said Cary, rather reluctantly. "But I warn you that my
sympathies are steadily going over to Hagan. The poor devil does not
look to have a dog's chance against you."

"He hasn't," said Dawson, with great satisfaction.

Cary, to whom the wonderful Clyde was as familiar as the river near
his own home, found the second trip almost as wearisome as the first.
But not quite. He was now able to recognise Hagan, who again appeared
as a brass-bounder, and did not affect to conceal his deep interest in
the naval panorama offered by the river. Nothing of real importance
can, of course, be learned from a casual steamer trip, but Hagan
seemed to think otherwise, for he was always either watching through
his glasses or asking apparently artless questions of passengers or
passing deckhands. Again a sailor seemed disposed to be communicative;
he pointed out more than one monster in steel, red raw with surface
rust, and gave particulars of a completed power which would have
surprised the Admiralty Superintendent. They would not, however, have
surprised Mr. Cary, in whose ingenious brain they had been conceived.
This second trip, like the first, was declared by Dawson to have been
a great success. "Did you know me?" he asked. "I was a clean-shaven
naval doctor, about as unlike the army colonel of the first trip as a
pigeon is unlike a gamecock. Hagan is off to London to-night by the