when Charon halted me.

“Stop your whistling,” he commanded. “Do you think this is a Sunday school picnic or a political rally? I don’t believe you are eligible[Pg 10] for the journey, anyway. Hades is the only place within the fifty-mile limit that is not a side show for New York tourists. This yacht transports shades only.”

[Pg 10]

“Well, you see,” I began hesitatingly, “Lorimer says clothes don’t make the man, but that they make three-fourths of him, and this suit is of the very latest shade of blue.”

“I’ve been told gray is fashionable just now,” he commented, critically. “Everybody in Hades has the blues, so you won’t be off color,” he added, somewhat mollified.

“Then you know my ancestors are all shades,” I pleaded, “and our city editor says I have a shady reputation.”

“A newspaper man!” Charon gasped, his face growing pale. “I’ll have to let you come aboard, or you will go back and ‘roast’ me, and I get all the ‘roasting’ I can stand in Hades between trips. A newspaper man! “Nuff said. Jump aboard.”

“Where is the house-boat?” I asked, ever on the lookout for “copy.”

“Everyone nowadays asks that fool question,” Charon retorted, angrily. “I believe John Bangs, like George Eliot, is a woman, for he can’t keep a secret, while Harper & Brothers offer him royalties for it. Shortly after the ‘Pursuit of the House-boat’ that craft disappeared from the river and Sherlock Holmes with it. He went back to haunt Conan Doyle, I guess. I hope he won’t come[Pg 11] back again in a hurry, for he made no end of trouble with his inferences and his deductions.”

[Pg 11]

“What—”

“No more questions, if you please. I am not on the witness stand, nor will I consent to be interviewed. Besides, talking is an infraction of the rules of the Asbestos Society.”

“Do they seek to muzzle the press?” I asked indignantly.

“So few newspaper men come this way that that isn’t necessary,” returned Charon. “We have a free press. It is said that ‘the devil frequently becomes a publisher by way of diversion.’ This is the Styx, not the Delaware, and we are going to Hades, not to Philadelphia, thank goodness! The order was framed to muzzle some one more formidable than reporters or 

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