stone to whatever might offer; and when the Piccadilly Budget treated all the clubs to a merry half-hour by its piquant details of the early life of the latest created military baronet, or told how the great porter brewer's grandfather burnt the malt by accident and so laid the foundation to his fortune, or gave a most piquant version of an old scandal with modern touches as applicable to the newest woman writer, brother journalists were green with envy. Readers in the running said: "That's Dick O'Grady's par.," and wondered where the deuce the fellow picked up his facts. And Dick smiled at acquaintances with the winning smile that too was an inheritance from the Captain, and stopped his hansom to greet a club gossip useful to push him into the set he wished to enter, told him a rattling good story of the latest "star's" mother, whom he happened to know was a canteen woman in the Curragh in 1856, and was promised a card in return for Lady C.'s crush; sometimes, too, he found a modernised version of the Captain's chivalrous manner to women of almost miraculous effect in conciliating the esoteric petticoat influence of some leading daily; and, conscious of his debt, he would order a new dress suit and send the old boy half a sovereign with a letter bemoaning the shortness of "oof," and asking three questions no one else in London could answer him. His Sunday afternoon with the Captain was always profitably spent; he gleaned stores of workable anecdotes, and if the stories he deftly drew out gained in malice as they lost in genial humanity, and the rennet of his cynicism turned sour the milk of human kindness that ran through the Captain's worst tale—well, he was the better latter-day journalist for that. Nowise deceived, the old man would pocket the stray shillings, and wash the taste of the interview down with a glass of his favourite Jamieson, swearing he would make that cub, with the mind of a journalising huckster, cry small when he published his book.
