“Look here, cully,” interrupted De Costa, speaking most confidentially. “Look here, cully, you say you want men that can do that? Well, I’m your oyster. You want to engage me on the spot at your highest salary.”

It is not within my province to describe the process of thought by which these two came ultimately to agree. De Costa’s impudence may have awed the official into submission, or a fine sense of humor may have led the gentleman to give the veteran another trial. At all events, my friend of the military title found his way to the operating-room that very afternoon, and was enrolled on the list at the “highest salary,” as he had suggested. During his stay his relations were tolerably pleasant, though some of his colaborers were taken down a peg or two occasionally by his manner of answering their inquiries. A message of his receiving, containing upward of a hundred words, was once handed to a new operator for transmission to some point in the East. It was beautifully written and filled the blank completely. The sender got on gloriously until he reached the bottom, and then he was unable to see the check. He looked for it at the top and on the margin, but his “eager and expectant gaze” was each time disappointed. As a last resource he marched over to Cap.’s desk and said, very demurely:

“Mr. De Costa, you seem to have omitted the check by some—”

“Omitted the devil,” responded Cap., a little pompously, observing with a wink at his interrogator, “nice copy, ain’t it?” Then he turned it over and pointing to the middle of the back, exclaimed, “Why, you tow- topped lunkhead, what do you call that?” The check was there on the back, looming up solitary and alone, like the Latin inscription “Hic” on the tombstone of the departed inebriate.

His friends thought he had reformed, and, indeed, his behavior for a few months was so much better than was expected, that the position of all night man, which had become vacant, was tendered him. The duties were light, with hours from 1 A. M. to 8 A. M. As a general thing he took scarcely a half dozen messages, besides sending a little press to San Francisco, and jogged on the even tenor of his way as happy as a bird. But there came a sad, regretful pay-day night when Cap. met with a misfortune. He looked upon the wine when it was red.

“On horror’s head horrors accumulate,” you know, so it was not surprising that, after he had relieved his men, that San Francisco should offer a “special.” I fancy that deep emotions were working in the old boy’s breast when the doleful information came bumping across the plains; but be that as it may, deep emotions were working in several other breasts next morning. A special, which should have appeared in the New York Tribune that day, for reasons which the reader may surmise, hung innocently on its hook in the San Francisco office until long after the cock’s shrill clarion had waked the echoes of the new born day.

The manager—or “Charley,” as the Captain always called him—by some strange chance came earlier to the office that morning than usual, to find the door open, the fire gone out, and the room vacant. The butt of a cigar lying on the “overland” desk indicated that De Costa had sat pondering there on his duty, and the feasibility of his performing it. The circuit closer was open, a piece of tin, which Cap. always took with him when he changed his base, was gone from the sounder, and on a blank lying loose among many others was written in pencil, in a neat chirography, unmistakably his, the following laconic adieu:

“Charley: