"Well, it's about him that I came to see you. This yer's a McHulish--a
genuine McHulish!"

He paused, as if to give effect to this statement. But the name
apparently offered no thrilling suggestion to the consul, who regarded
the young man closely for further explanation. He was a fair-faced youth
of about twenty years, with pale reddish-brown eyes, dark hair reddish
at the roots, and a singular white and pink waxiness of oval cheek,
which, however, narrowed suddenly at the angle of the jaw, and fell away
with the retreating chin.

"Yes," continued Custer; "I oughter say the ONLY McHulish. He is the
direct heir--and of royal descent! He's one of them McHulishes whose
name in them old history times was enough to whoop up the boys and make
'em paint the town red. A regular campaign boomer--the old McHulish was.
Stump speeches and brass-bands warn't in it with the boys when HE was
around. They'd go their bottom dollar and last cartridge--if they'd had
cartridges in them days--on him. That was the regular McHulish gait. And
Malcolm there's the last of 'em--got the same style of features, too."

Ludicrous as the situation was, it struck the consul dimly, as
through fog and darkness, that the features of the young man were not
unfamiliar, and indeed had looked out upon him dimly and vaguely at
various times, from various historic canvases. It was the face of
complacent fatuity, incompetency, and inconstancy, which had dragged
down strength, competency, and constancy to its own idiotic fate and
levels,--a face for whose weaknesses valor and beauty had not only
sacrificed themselves, but made things equally unpleasant to a great
many minor virtues. Nevertheless, the consul, with an amused sense of
its ridiculous incongruity to the grim Scottish Sabbath procession in