Page:An African Millionaire.djvu/258

Rh to spend a few days before sailing in the Senator's magnificent and newly-finished palace at the upper end of Fifth Avenue.

'There, at least, I shall be safe, Sey,' he said to me plaintively, with a weary smile. 'Wrengold, at any rate, won't try to take me in—except, of course, in the regular way of business.'

Boss-Nugget Hall (as it is popularly christened) is perhaps the handsomest brown stone mansion in the Richardsonian style on all Fifth Avenue. We spent a delightful week there. The lines had fallen to us in pleasant places. On the night we arrived Wrengold gave a small bachelor party in our honour. He knew Sir Charles was travelling without Lady Vandrift, and rightly judged he would prefer on his first night an informal party, with cards and cigars, instead of being bothered with the charming, but still somewhat hampering addition of female society.

The guests that evening were no more than seven, all told, ourselves included—making up, Wrengold said, that perfect number, an octave. He was a nouveau riche himself—the newest of the new—commonly known in exclusive old-fashioned New York society as the Gilded Squatter; for he 'struck his reef' no more than ten years ago; and he was therefore doubly anxious, after the American style, to be 'just dizzy with culture.' In his capacity of Mæcenas, he had invited amongst others the latest of English literary arrivals in New York—Mr.