partner? One year before when Mr. Mitchell's bill was seven thousand
dollars, Mr. Croker, being in a frugal mood, felt excessively pained.
Why then should it mount last autumn to three hundred thousand dollars
and excite neither grief nor reproach? And what was got for those
three hundred thousand dollars? When a show leaves New York, it
carries posters wherewith to embellish each fence and bill board in
the land; and yet no show ever paid more than ten thousand dollars for
paper. Five thousand dollars will cover every possible coign of
bill-sticking advantage and hang, besides, a lithograph of Mr. Shepard
in every window in the city of New York. Then wherefore those three
hundred thousand dollars of Tammany? There be folk on the finance
committee who should go into this business with a lantern. The most
hopeful name of these is Mr. McDonald, our great subway contractor
and partner of Mr. August Belmont; he is a member of that committee.
He is, too, a gentleman of intelligence, business habits and high
worth. Mr. McDonald of the subway, for his own credit and that of Mr.
Belmont, his partner, should never sleep until he turned out the
bottom facts of that Tammany treasure which has disappeared. Nor
should a common interest with Mr. Croker and certain of that
gentleman's retainers in the Port Chester railway deter him. Is there
no honest man in Athens?"

* * * * *

It was at the close of the repast and when cigars were smokily going
that Vacuum returned to the subject of Tammany Hall.

"Let me congratulate you, my dear Enfield," observed Vacuum
courteously, "on your genius for prophecy. At our last meeting, you
foretold the near overthrow of Mr. Nixon and the Croker regime. The