stilled, whereupon the gentleman of contrarieties at once resumed the gentle and indifferent melancholy of manner and address.

“Let us off with the old love before we are on with the new, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll bury the dead first, and choose his successor afterward, — decently and in order, I trust, and with due submission to the majority.”

“I’ll fight for my rights,” growled Red Gil.

“And I for mine,” cried the Spaniard.

“And each of us’ll back his own man,” muttered in an aside the gravedigger with the broken head.

The one they called Paradise sighed. “It is a thousand pities that there is not amongst us some one of so preeminent that faction should hide its head before it. But to the work in hand, gentlemen.”