pale twilight now made objects discernible and I breathed more freely, for I no longer stumbled over the good resolutions, which, being broken, blocked the pavement.

A troop of spectres surrounded me and tried to stop my progress. Shades though they were,[Pg 16] their attentions were annoying and I tried to brush them aside. My hands passed through shadows and the phantoms laughed in derision.

[Pg 16]

“What’s the news?” they cried again and again.

I hadn’t come to Hades to be interviewed, and knowing from the inside some of its perils, I declined to relate what the upper world was doing. This enraged the shades, who gathered about me threateningly. Just then one of my companions on the Styx yachting trip came to my aid. His appearance seemed to inspire the spectres with terror, for they all fled. The newcomer was talkative.

“Did you recognize in the leader of that band our old friend, Diogenes?” he asked.

“No, I never met the gentleman. Up on earth when any one is looking for an honest man, he doesn’t come to a newspaper office: he goes to a detective agency.”

My companion gave a scarcely perceptible start.

“Diogenes is no longer looking for an honest man. Poor fellow, he knows it’s no use. He thought he had an honest man a few years ago in ‘Boss’ Tweed, but the politician fell from the high pedestal of the ‘man higher up’ when he consented to pose for a caricature of himself by Nast. Our friend of the tub and lantern has begun to wonder if when he finds an honest man it will prove to be a bachelor girl! Not long ago[Pg 17] President Harper sent a professor from the University of Chicago to tell Diogenes that he could have an honest man as soon as he had bled him for another hundred million. So the philosopher is waiting for—”

[Pg 17]

“John D. Rockefeller!”

“Your deduction, my dear journalist, does you credit.”

Somewhat piqued that I did not reply, the stranger said:

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