A Face at Sherry's

"No. Just Indiana,-one of the sovereign American
states, as you ought to know."

"Indians?"

"No; warranted all dead."

"Pack-train-balloon-automobile-camels,-how do
you get there?"

"Varnished ears. It's easy. It's not the getting there;
it's the not dying of ennui after you're on the spot."

"Humph! What hour did you say for the dinner?"

"Seven o'clock. Meet me at the entrance."

"If I'm at large! Allow me to precede you through
the door, and don't follow me on the street please!"

He walked away, his gloved hands clasped lazily behind
him, lounged out upon Broadway and turned
toward the Battery. I waited until he disappeared, then
took an up-town car.

My first meeting with Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople,
at a café where I was dining. He got into
a row with an Englishman and knocked him down. It
was not my affair, but I liked the ease and definiteness
with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I
learned later that it was a way he had. The Englishman
meant well enough, but he could not, of course,
know the intensity of Larry's feeling about the unhappy
lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance
with Donovan I sometimes argued with him, but I
soon learned better manners. He quite converted me to
his own notion of Irish affairs, and I was as hot an
advocate as he of head-smashing as a means of restoring
Ireland's lost prestige.

My friend, the American consul-general at Constantinople,
was not without a sense of humor, and I
easily enlisted him in Larry's behalf. The Englishman
thirsted for vengeance and invoked all the powers. He
insisted, with reason, that Larry was a British subject
and that the American consul had no right to give him
asylum,-a point that was, I understand, thoroughly
well-grounded in law and fact. Larry maintained, on
the other hand, that he was not English but Irish, and
that, as his country maintained no representative in
Turkey, it was his privilege to find refuge wherever it
was offered. Larry was always the most plausible of
human beings, and between us,-he, the American consul
and I,-we made an impression, and got him off.