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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton, by
+Wardon Allan Curtis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton
+
+Author: Wardon Allan Curtis
+
+Release Date: January 28, 2009 [EBook #27917]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE ADVENTURES MR. MIDDLETON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Strange Adventures _of_ Mr. Middleton
+
+
+
+BY
+
+
+
+WARDON ALLAN CURTIS
+
+
+
+CHICAGO
+HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY
+
+MCMIII
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
+HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY
+CHICAGO
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  The Manner in Which Mr. Edward Middleton Encounters the Emir
+        Achmed Ben Daoud
+  The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir
+  The Adventure of William Hicks
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir
+  The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift of the Emir
+  The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir
+  The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Sixth Gift of the Emir
+  The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Seventh Gift of
+        the Emir
+  The Adventure of Achmed Ben Daoud
+  What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Eighth and Last Gift of
+        the Emir
+
+
+
+
+_The_ Strange Adventures _of_ Mr. Middleton
+
+
+
+
+_The Manner in Which Mr. Edward Middleton Encounters the Emir Achmed
+Ben Daoud._
+
+
+It was a lowering and gloomy night in the early part of the present
+century. Mr. Edward Middleton, a gallant youth, who had but lately
+passed his twenty-third year, was faring northward along the southern
+part of that famous avenue of commerce, Clark Street, in the city of
+Chicago, wending his way toward the emporium of Mr. Marks Cohen.
+Suddenly the rain which the cloudy heaven had been promising for many
+hours, began to descend in great scattered drops that presaged a heavy
+shower. Mr. Middleton hastened his steps. It was possible that if the
+dress-suit he wore, hired for the occasion of the wedding of his
+friend, Mr. Chauncey Stackelberg, should become imbued with moisture
+in the shower that now seemed imminent, Mr. Cohen, of whom he had
+hired the suit, would not add to the modicum agreed upon, a charge for
+pressing it. But if his own suit for everyday wear, which he was
+carrying under his arm with the purpose of putting it on at good Mr.
+Cohen's establishment, should become wet, that would be a serious
+matter. It was, in fact, his only suit and that will explain the
+anxiety with which he scanned the heavens. Suddenly, Pluvius unloosed
+all the fountains of the sky, and with scarcely a thought whither he
+was going, Mr. Middleton darted into the first haven of refuge, a
+little shop he happened to be just passing. As the door closed behind
+him with the tinkle of a bell in some remote recess, for the first
+time he realized that the place he had entered was utterly dark. His
+ears, straining to their uttermost to make compensation for the
+inability of his eyes to be of service to him in this juncture, could
+no more than inform him that the place was utterly silent. But to his
+nose came the powerful fragrance of strange foreign aromas such as he
+had never had experience of before,--which, heavy and oppressive in
+their cloying perfume, seemed the very breath of mystery. All traffic
+had ceased without, as the night was well advanced and the rain beat
+so heavily that the few whom business or pleasure had called abroad at
+that hour, had sought shelter. But though the rain now fell with a
+steady roar, Mr. Middleton, perturbed by a nameless disquiet, was
+about to rush forth into the tempest and seek other shelter, when a
+door burst open and, outlined against a glare of light, stood a
+gigantic man who said in a deep, low voice that seemed to pervade
+every corner of the room and cause the air to shake in slow
+vibrations, "Salaam aleikoom!" Which being repeated again, Mr.
+Middleton replied:
+
+"I do not understand the German language."
+
+A low, musical laugh greeted this remark and the laugh resolving
+itself into a low, musical voice that bade him enter, Mr. Middleton
+found himself in a small boudoir of oriental magnificence, facing a
+young man in the costume of the Moslem nations, who sat cross-legged
+upon a divan smoking a narghileh. He was of perhaps twenty-six,
+somewhat slight, but elegant of person. His face, extremely handsome,
+betokened that he was a man of intelligence and sensibility. Two
+brilliant, sparkling eyes illumined his countenance and the curl of
+his carmine lips was that of one who while kind--without condescension
+and the odiousness of patronage--to all whom the mischance of fate had
+made his inferiors in fortune, would not bend the fawning knee to any
+whom the world calls great. Behind him stood a giant blackamore, he of
+the voice that had saluted Mr. Middleton. The blackamore was dressed
+in crimson silk sparkling with an array of gold lace, but his immense
+turban was snowy white. Against his shoulder reposed a great
+glittering scimetar and a dozen silver-mounted pistols and poniards
+were thrust in his sash.
+
+Presently the young man removed the golden mouth-piece of the
+narghileh from his lips and regarding Mr. Middleton fixedly, remarked:
+
+"There is but one God and Mohammed is his Prophet."
+
+Now this was not the doctrine Mr. Middleton had been taught in the
+Methodist Sunday School in Janesville, Wisconsin, but disliking to
+dispute with one so engaging as the handsome Moslem, and having read
+in a book of etiquette that it was very ill mannered to indulge in
+theological controversy and, moreover, being conscious of the presence
+of the blackamore with the glittering scimetar, he began to make his
+excuses for an immediate departure. But the Moslem would not hear to
+this.
+
+"Mesrour will bear your garments to Mr. Cohen. From your visage, I
+judge you to be a person I wish to know. I take you to be endowed with
+probity, discretion, and valor, and not without wit, good taste, and
+good manners. Mesrour, relieve the gentleman of his burden."
+
+Whereupon Mr. Middleton was compelled to state that it was the garment
+on his back that was to go to Mr. Cohen, though he feared this
+confession would cause him to fall in the estimation of the Moslem.
+But the stranger relaxed none of his deference at this intimation that
+Mr. Middleton was not a person of consequence.
+
+"Mesrour, take two sequins from the ebony chest. The price the
+extortionate tailor charges, is some thirty piastres. Bring back the
+change and a receipt."
+
+"Salaam, effendim!" and Mesrour bowed until the crown of his head was
+presented toward his master, together with the palms of his hands, and
+in this posture backed from the room, leaving Mr. Middleton
+speculating upon the wonder and alarm little Mr. Cohen would
+experience at beholding the gigantic Nubian in all his outlandish
+panoply. While changing the dress suit for his street wear, from a
+back room came the sound of the blackamore moving about, chanting that
+weird refrain, tumpty, tumpty, tum--tum; tumpty, tumpty, tum--tum;
+which from Mesopotamia to the Pillars of Hercules, from the time of
+Ishmael to the present, has been the song of the sons of the desert.
+What was his surprise when the blackamore emerged. Gone were his
+turban, his flowing trousers, his scimetar, pistols, and poniards. He
+had on a long yellow mackintosh, which did not, however, conceal a
+pair of black and white checked pantaloons, a red tie, and green vest,
+from each upper pocket of which projected an ivory-handled razor.
+
+"Don't forget the change, Mesrour."
+
+"No indeed, boss," replied the blackamore, whistling "Mah Tiger Lily,"
+as he departed.
+
+The Moslem provided Mr. Middleton with one of those pipes which in
+various parts of the Orient are known as narghilehs, hubble-bubbles,
+or hookabadours, and seeing his guest entirely at his ease, without
+ado began as follows:
+
+"My name is Achmed Ben Daoud, and I am hereditary emir of the tribe of
+Al-Yam, which ranges on the border of that fortunate part of the
+Arabian peninsular known as Arabia the Happy. My youngest brother,
+Ismail, desirous of seeing the world, went to the court of Oman, where
+struck by his inimitable skill in narration, the imam installed him as
+royal story-teller. But having in the space of a year exhausted his
+stock of stories, the imam, who is blessed with an excellent memory,
+discovering that he was telling the same stories over again, shut him
+up in a tower constructed of vermilion stone quarried on the upper
+waters of the great river Euphrates. There my poor brother is to stay
+until he can invent a new stock of stories, but being utterly devoid
+of invention, only death or relenting upon the part of the imam could
+release him. Hearing of his plight, I went to the imam with the
+proposition that I seek out some other story-teller and that upon
+bringing him to Muscat, my brother be released. But the imam exclaimed
+that he was tired of tales of genii and magicians, of enchantments and
+spells, devils, dragons, and rocs.
+
+"'These things are too common, too everyday. Go to the country of the
+Franks and bring me a story-teller who shall tell me tales of far
+nations, and I will release Ismail, and load him with treasure.'
+
+"'My Lord,' said I, 'peradventure no Frank story-teller will come. To
+guard against such eventuality, I will myself go to the lands of the
+Franks, there to learn of adventures worthy the ear of your highness.
+This I will do that my brother may be released from the vermilion
+tower.'
+
+"'Do this, and I will give him the vermilion tower and make him grand
+vizier of the dominions of Oman.'
+
+"As hereditary emir of the tribe of Al-Yam, I am prince of a
+considerable population. My revenues are sufficient to support life
+becomingly. But desiring to escape attention, and moreover, feeling
+that I could better get in touch with all classes of the population, I
+have established here in Chicago a small bazaar for the sale of
+frankincense and myrrh, the balsam of Hadramaut and attar of roses
+from the vales of Nejd, coffee of Mocha--which is in Arabia the
+Happy--dates from Hedjaz, together with ornaments made from wood grown
+in Mecca and Medina. Such is my stock in trade. By day, Mesrour and I
+dress like Feringhis. But at night, it pleases us to cast aside the
+stiff garb of the infidel for the flowing garments of my native land.
+Mesrour then delights to make the obeisances my rank deserves, but
+which in the presence of the giaours would excite mocking laughter. I
+have prospered. I have made acquaintances and have learned of many
+adventures. But I have made no friends. I have been much prepossessed
+by your bearing and feel that I would like to have you for a friend. I
+am also desirous of observing the effect of the tales of adventure I
+have been collecting. I need to acquire skill in the art of narration,
+and accordingly, I must have someone to tell them to, a person whose
+complaisance will cause him to overlook the faults of a novice. I am
+exceedingly anxious to have the distinguished honor of your company
+and if you have any evenings when you are at leisure, I should be only
+too glad to have you spend them here."
+
+"I can come this day week," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"So be it. On that occasion I will tell you the tale of The Adventure
+of the Virtuous Spinster. I have not asked you your calling in life,
+for I am utterly without curiosity----"
+
+"I am a clerk in a law office," said Mr. Middleton, quickly, "where I
+perform certain tasks and at the same time study law, and it is my
+hope to be soon admitted to the bar."
+
+Prince Achmed regarded him earnestly for a moment, and then withdrew
+to return with a sandalwood case in his hands. This he opened to
+disclose a leathern-bound volume. Upon the cover was stamped a great
+gilt monogram of letters in some strange language. The edges were
+stained a brilliant and peculiarly vivid green. The pages were of fine
+pearl-colored vellum, covered with strange characters in black. Each
+chapter began with a great red initial surrounded by an illuminated
+design of many colored arabesques. It was indeed a volume to cause a
+book-lover to cry out with joy.
+
+"Here is all the law man needs, the sacred Koran. Here is the
+beginning and end of law, the source of regulations that ensure
+righteous conduct, the precepts of Mohammed, prophet of Allah. If
+other laws agree with those of the Koran, they are needless. If they
+disagree, they are evil. Study this guide of life, my friend, and
+there will be no need to worry your brain with tomes of the
+presumptuous wights who from their own imaginings dare attempt to
+dictate laws and impiously substitute them for the laws revealed to
+Mohammed from on high. Accept this gift and study it."
+
+With the sandalwood case containing the precious volume of the law
+under his arm, Mr. Middleton departed. After the lapse of three days,
+finding no immediate prospect of learning the Arabic language, and
+fearful of offending Prince Achmed if he returned the book, and having
+no possible use for it, he took it to a bibliophile, who exclaiming
+that it was the handiwork of a Mohammedan monastery of Damascus and
+bore on the cover the monogram of the fifth Fatimite caliph, and was
+therefore a thousand years old, he told Mr. Middleton that though it
+was worth much more, he could offer him but five hundred dollars,
+which sum the astonished friend of Achmed received in a daze, and
+departed to invest in a well located lot in a new suburb. Having no
+use for the sandalwood case after the Koran had been disposed of, he
+presented it to a young lady of Englewood as a receptacle for
+handkerchiefs.
+
+Mr. Middleton said nothing of these transactions when on the appointed
+evening he once more sat in the presence of the urbane prince of the
+tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored
+sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Adventure of the Virtuous
+Spinster.
+
+
+
+
+
+_The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster._
+
+
+Miss Almira Johnson was a virtuous spinster, aged thirty-nine, who
+lived in a highly respectable boarding-house on the north side. Her
+days she spent in keeping the books of a large leather firm, in an
+office which she shared with two male clerks who were married, and a
+red-headed boy of sixteen, who was small for his age.
+
+On the evening when my tale begins, Miss Almira, tastefully attired
+for her night's rest in a white nightgown trimmed with blue lace, was
+peeping under the bed for the ever-possible man, the nightly rite
+preliminary to her prayers. She fell back gasping in a vain attempt to
+scream, but not a sound could she give vent to. The precaution of
+years had been justified. _There lay a man!_ He was habited in a very
+genteel frock-suit, patent-leather shoes, and although it must have
+caused him some inconvenience in his recumbent position, upon his head
+was a correct plug hat. The elegance and respectability of his garb
+somewhat reassured Miss Almira, who was unable to believe that one so
+apparelled could have secreted himself under her bed for an evil
+purpose, when a new fear seized her, for arguing from this assumption,
+she concluded he must have been placed there by others and was, in
+short, dead. Whereupon, having to some degree recovered possession of
+herself, she was opening her mouth to scream at this new terror, when
+the man spoke.
+
+"Listen before you scream, I pray thee, beauteous lady, darling of my
+life, pearl of my desires, star of my hopes."
+
+The strangeness of the address and the unaccustomed epithets caused
+Miss Almira to forbear, for she could not hear what he had to say and
+scream at the same time, and, moreover, she remembered how twenty
+years before, Jake Long had fled, never to return to her side, when
+after telling her she was the sweetest thing in the world, she had
+screamed as his arms clasped about her in a bearish hug.
+
+"Fair lady, ornament of your sex, hear the words of your ardent
+admirer before you blast his hopes."
+
+As he uttered these words, the stranger extricated himself from his
+undignified position and sat down in a rocking chair before the
+bureau. Miss Almira was more than ever prepossessed as she saw he wore
+white kid gloves and that in his shirt front gleamed a large diamond.
+He removed his hat, disclosing a heavy crop of black hair. He had blue
+eyes and a strong, clean-shaven face.
+
+"For some time I have observed you and wondered how I was to realize
+my fondest hopes and make your acquaintance. All day you are in the
+office, where the two married men and the red-headed boy are always
+_de trop_. My employment is of a nature that takes me out nights. In
+fact, I teach a night school for Italians. To-day being an Italian
+holiday and so no school, and as there is a possibility I shall soon
+leave the city for an extended season, I have been unable to devise
+any other means of declaring myself before the time for my departure.
+Pray pardon me for the abruptness and importunity of my declaration,
+pray forgive me for the unusual way which I have taken to secure an
+interview alone with you. But if you only knew the ardor of my love,
+my impatience--oh, would that our union could be effected this very
+night!"
+
+Ravished by the elegance of the stranger both in his outward seeming
+and his converse, melted by the warmth of a romantic devotion almost
+unknown in these degenerate days, though common enough of yore, Miss
+Almira paused a moment in the proud compliance of one about to gladly
+bestow an inestimable, but hardly hoped-for gift, and crying, "It can
+be done, it shall be done," threw herself into the cavalier's arms.
+
+"How so?" asked the stranger, after Miss Almira had disengaged herself
+at the elapse of a proper interval.
+
+"Why, the Rev. Eusebius Williams has the next room. We will call him."
+
+"But," said the stranger, "I thought the occupant of the next room was
+Mr. Algernon Tibbs, a gentleman from the country, who has recently
+sold a large number of hogs here in the city and has been ill in his
+room for a space by reason of a contusion on the head from a gold
+brick, which was, so to speak, twice thrown at his head, once
+figuratively as a ridiculously fine bargain which he refused to take,
+and again when the owner, angered, struck him with the rejected gold."
+
+"I see," said Miss Almira archly, "that in planning for this, you have
+tried to study the lay of the land; but be gratified, sir, for the
+lucky chance which prevented a sad mistake. Mr. Tibbs and I do occupy
+adjoining rooms. But the one Mr. Tibbs occupies is really mine. To-day
+we exchanged and I will remain here for the four or five days Mr.
+Tibbs is to be in the city. He has a large sum of money in his
+possession, so we all infer. At any rate, he was afraid to sleep in
+this room, where there is a fire escape at the window, and took mine,
+where an unscalable wall prevents access. Suppose the Italian holiday
+had been last night and you had come then. He would then have taken
+you for a robber, notwithstanding that anybody could see you are a
+gentleman."
+
+For the first time did Miss Almira become conscious she was not robed
+as one should be while receiving callers, and blushing violently, she
+leaped into bed, whence she bid the stranger retire for a bit until
+she could dress, when they would invoke the kindly offices of the Rev.
+Eusebius Williams.
+
+"Your name," she called, as the stranger was about to retire.
+
+"My name," said he impressively, "which will soon be yours, is
+Breckenridge Endicott."
+
+"Mulvane," said Mr. Breckenridge Endicott to himself, noiselessly
+descending the stairs, "what if she had screamed before you had pulled
+yourself together and thought of that stunt? You didn't get old Tibb's
+money, but you did get--away."
+
+Mr. Endicott tried the front door. To his apparent annoyance, there
+was no bolt, no knob to unlock it, and key there was none. In the
+parlors, he could hear the voices of boarders.
+
+"No way there, Mulvane," said Mr. Endicott. "I'll go into the kitchen
+and walk out the back door. If there's anybody there, they'll think me
+a new boarder."
+
+But he started violently and stood for some moments trembling for no
+assignable reason, as he saw in front of the range a fat German hired
+girl sitting in the lap of a fat Irish policeman.
+
+"No go through Almira's room to the fire escape. But perhaps I can get
+out on the roof and get away somehow. She can't have dressed so soon,"
+and he ascended the stairs to run plump into Miss Almira, who popped
+out of her room, resplendent in a rustling black silk.
+
+"Oh, you impatient thing," said Miss Almira, shaking a reproving
+finger. "I put this on, and then I thought I ought to wear something
+white, and so came out to tell you not to get impatient waiting, and
+why I kept you so long," and back she popped.
+
+"You are up against it, Mulvane," said Mr. Breckenridge Endicott,
+sitting disconsolately down upon the stairs. "Hold on, just the thing.
+Why, as her husband, you'll live here unsuspected and get in with old
+Tibbs. Why, the job will be pie. It won't be mean to her, either. When
+you just vanish, she'll have 'Mrs.' tacked to her name, and that'll
+help her. It will be lots of satisfaction. They can't call her an old
+maid. 'Better 'tis to have loved and lost than never to have loved at
+all.' I'll give her some of the boodle. She isn't bad looking. Wonder
+why nobody ever grabbed on to her. If I had enough to live well, I'd
+marry her myself and settle down."
+
+The Rev. Eusebius Williams, with ten dollars fee in his right
+pantaloons pocket, and the radiant Almira, did not look happier during
+the wedding ceremony than did Mr. Breckenridge Endicott.
+
+It was seldom that Mr. Endicott was absent from the side of his wife
+during the next few days. Occasionally pleading urgent business, he
+left her to go down town with Mr. Tibbs, whom he was seeking to
+interest in a plan to extract gold from sea water, a plan upon which
+Mr. Tibbs looked with some favor, for as presented by Mr. Endicott, it
+was one of great feasibility and promised enormous profits. In the
+setting forth of the method of extraction, Mr. Endicott was much aided
+by his wife, who overhearing him in earnest consultation with Mr.
+Tibbs bounded in and demanded to know what it was all about. Mr.
+Endicott demurred, saying it was an abstruse matter which should not
+burden so poetical a mind as hers. But Mr. Tibbs set it forth to her
+briefly. Having in her youth made much of the sciences of chemistry
+and physics, to the great amaze and admiration of Mr. Endicott, she
+launched into a most lucid explication of the practicability of the
+plan, leaving Mr. Tibbs more than ever inclined to venture his
+thousands.
+
+"By Jove, she'll do, Mulvane. Why cut and run? Take her along. She is
+a splendid grafter," said Mr. Endicott to himself, as he and his wife
+withdrew from the presence of Mr. Tibbs. "My dear," he continued
+aloud, "I was overcome by respect for the way you aided me. You are
+indeed a jewel. I had never suspected you understood me, knew what I
+was, until you came in and explained that sucker trap. You are a most
+unexpected ally. You perceive clearly how the thing works?"
+
+"Why, of course, Breckenridge. I have not studied science in vain,
+though I do not recall what part of the machine you call 'sucker
+trap'. Doubtless the contrivance marked 'converter,' in the drawings.
+Of course I understood you, right from the first, a noble, noble man,
+and so romantic. But Brecky, dear, why let other people share in this
+invention? Why not make all the money ourselves and become million,
+millionaires? I shall build churches and libraries and support
+missionaries. Why let Mr. Tibbs, who is a somewhat gross person, enjoy
+any of the fruits of your genius?"
+
+Whereupon Mr. Endicott's face took on an expression of deep
+disappointment, disillusionment, and sorrow, until seeing his own
+sorrow mingled with alarm reflected on his wife's face, he presently
+announced that they would depart on their wedding journey by boat for
+Mackinac three days hence.
+
+"I shall stop fiddle-faddling and settle the business which delays me
+here, at one stroke. The old simple methods are the best."
+
+As Mr. and Mrs. Breckenridge Endicott were entering their cab to drive
+to the wharf, Mrs. Maxon, the landlady, came hurriedly with the
+scandal that Mr. Algernon Tibbs had been found in his room in the
+stupor of intoxication.
+
+"Why, he might have been robbed while in that condition," said Mrs.
+Maxon.
+
+"He will not be robbed while under your roof," said Mr. Endicott
+gallantly. "He is safe from robbing now. He will not, he cannot, I may
+say, be robbed now."
+
+The sun was touching the western horizon as the steamer glided out of
+the river's mouth. The wind lay dead upon the water, and for a space
+the pair sat in the tender light of declining day indulging in the
+pleasures of conversation, but at length Mr. Endicott led his wife to
+their stateroom.
+
+"On this auspicious day, I wish to make you a gift," and he handed her
+a thousand dollars in bills. "My presence is now required on the lower
+deck for a time. Be patient during my absence," whereupon he embraced
+her with an ardor he had never shown before and there was in his voice
+a strange ring of regret and longing such as Almira had never listened
+to. It thrilled her very soul and bestowing upon him a shower of
+passionate kisses and an embrace of the utmost affection, their
+parting took on almost the agony of a parting for years.
+
+"Where the devil is that coal passer Mullanphy, I gave a job to?" said
+the engineer on the lower deck. "Is he aboard?"
+
+"His dunnage is in his bunk, but nobody ain't seen him," replied one
+of the crew.
+
+"Who the devil is that geezer in a Prince Albert and a plug hat that
+just went in back there, and what the devil is he up to?" said the
+engineer again, as a black-clothed figure passed toward the stern.
+
+A few moments later, a sturdy man in a jumper and overalls, his face
+smeared with grime, peered cautiously around a bulkhead, and seeing
+nobody, stepped quickly to the side of the vessel, bearing a limp and
+spineless figure in a black frock and silk hat. With a dextrous
+movement, he cast the thing forth, and as it went flopping through the
+air and slapped the water, from somewhere arose the voice of Mr.
+Breckenridge Endicott crying, "Help! help! help!"
+
+Mrs. Endicott, full of dole at the absence of her spouse and oppressed
+with a nameless disquiet, had paced the upper deck impatiently, and at
+this moment stood just above where her beloved went leaping to his
+doom. With one wild scream, she jumped, she scrambled, she fell to the
+lower deck, colliding with a man leaning out looking at the sinking
+figure. Down, with a vain and frantic clutching at the side that only
+served to stay his fall so that he slipped silently into the water
+under the vessel's counter, went the unfortunate man.
+
+Plump, into the yawl with the rescue crew, went Mrs. Endicott. Far
+astern through the dusk could be seen a black silk hat on the still
+water. Astern could be heard the voice of Mr. Breckenridge Endicott
+crying, "Quick, quick! I can swim a little, but I am almost gone!"
+
+"Turn to the left, to the left," cried Mrs. Endicott.
+
+"But the cries come from the right," said the coxswain.
+
+"That's his hat to the left. I know his hat. I saw him fall. I know
+his voice. It's his hat and his voice."
+
+The crew could have sworn that the cries came from the right, but to
+the hat they steered and the cries ceased before their arrival. They
+lifted the hat. Nothing beneath but eighty fathoms of water.
+
+It was some time thereafter that a fisherman came upon a corpse
+floating inshore. Its face was bloated to such an extent as to prevent
+recognition. Its clothes were those of a steamboat roustabout. In the
+breastpocket was a large pocketbook bearing in gilt letters the
+legend, "Mr. Breckenridge Endicott."
+
+"The present I gave him on the morning of our departure!" exclaimed
+Miss Almira, "now so strangely found on the dead body of the man who
+robbed him and probably murdered him."
+
+Although soaked, the bills were redeemable. The fisherman was a
+fisherman who owned a town house on Prairie Avenue and a country house
+at Oconomowoc and he would take no reward. The bills amounted to nine
+thousand dollars. Taking her fortune, Almira retired to her former
+home in Ogle county, Illinois, where once more meeting Mr. Jake Long,
+lately made a widower, after a decent period of waiting, they became
+man and wife. So it ended happily for all except the person who called
+himself Mr. Breckenridge Endicott--though I suspect that was not his
+name--and for Mr. Algernon Tibbs. Lest you waste pity on Mr. Algernon
+Tibbs, let me say that in his youth, he was accustomed to kill little
+girl's cats, and that his fortune was entirely one he beat out of his
+brother-in-law, James Wilkinson.
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+"The individual whose sad taking-off I have just narrated," said the
+emir of the tribe of Al-Yam, "affords an excellent example of the power
+of good clothes. Suppose he had secreted himself under Miss Almira's
+bed wearing a jumper, overalls, and a mask. He would have been
+arrested and lodged in the penitentiary."
+
+"But he is now dead," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"He had better be dead, than continuing his career of villainy and
+crime," quoth the emir sternly, and then passing his eyes over the
+person of Mr. Middleton, he remarked the somewhat threadbare and
+glossy garments of that excellent young man. "If you would accept a
+suit of raiment from me," continued the emir with a hesitation that
+betrayed the delicacy which was one of the most marked of the many
+estimable traits that made his character so admirable, "I would be
+overjoyed and obliged. The interests of you, my only friend in this
+vast land, have become to me as my own. Unfortunately I have no Frank
+clothes except the one suit I wear daily. But of the costumes of my
+native land, I have abundant store, and as we are of the same stature,
+I beg you will make me happy by accepting one."
+
+Speaking some words to Mesrour in the language of Arabia, the
+blackamore brought in and proceeded to invest Mr. Middleton with an
+elegant silken habit consisting of a pair of exceedingly baggy
+trousers of the hue of emeralds, a round jacket whose crimson rivalled
+the rubies of Farther Ind, and a vest of snowy white. Double rows of
+small pearls ornamented the edges of the jacket, which was short and
+just met a copper-colored sash about the waist. After inducting him
+into a pair of white leggings and bronze shoes, Mesrour clapped upon
+his head a large white turban ornamented with a black aigret.
+
+Mr. Middleton looked very well in his new garments and while the emir
+was complimenting him upon this fact and the grace of his bearing and
+Mr. Middleton was uttering protestations of gratitude, Mesrour busied
+himself, and Mr. Middleton, turning with intent to resume his wonted
+garb, was astonished to find it in a network of heavy twine tied with
+a multiplicity of knots.
+
+"Mesrour will bring you your Frank clothes in the morning. I am very
+tired, and so I will bid you good night," and the yawn which now
+overspread the face of the accomplished prince told more than his
+words that the audience was ended.
+
+Mr. Middleton looked at the bundle with its array of knots. To untie
+it would require a long time and the prince was repeating his yawn and
+his good night. Even had he not hesitated to offend the prince by
+demanding opportunity to resume his customary vestments and to weary
+him by making him wait for this operation, which promised to be a long
+one, he would have been without volition in the matter; for in
+obedience to a gesture, Mesrour grasped his arm and with great
+deference, but inflexible and unalterable firmness, led him through
+the shop and closed the street door behind him.
+
+Mr. Middleton was greatly disconcerted at finding himself in the
+street arrayed in these brilliant and barbarous habiliments, but
+reflecting that the citizens traveling the streets at this hour would
+perhaps take him for some high official in one of the many fraternal
+orders that entertain, instruct, and edify the inhabitants of the
+city, he proceeded on his way somewhat reassured. As he was changing
+cars well toward his lodgings, at a corner where a large public hall
+reared its facade, he heard himself accosted, and turning, beheld a
+portly person wearing a gilt paper crown, a long robe of purple velvet
+bordered with rabbit's fur spotted with black, and bearing in his hand
+a bung-starter, which, covered with gilt paper, made a very creditable
+counterfeit of a royal scepter.
+
+"Come here once," said this personage.
+
+With great affableness expressing a willingness to come twice, if it
+were desired, Mr. Middleton accompanied the personage, as with an air
+of brooding mystery, the latter led him down the street twenty feet
+from where they had first stood.
+
+"Was you going to the masquerade?"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Middleton, divining from the presence of the personage
+and two other masquers whom he now beheld entering the hall, that a
+masquerade was in progress.
+
+"What'll you take to stay away?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You'll take the prize."
+
+"What is the prize and why should the possibility of winning it deter
+me?"
+
+"The prize is five dollars. It's this way. I am a saloonkeeper. Gustaf
+Kleiner and I are in love with the same girl. She is in love with all
+both of us. She don't know what to say. She can't marry all both, so
+she says she'll marry the one what gits the prize at the masquerade.
+If you git the prize, don't either of us git the girl already. I'll
+give you twenty dollars to stay away."
+
+"But what of Gustaf Kleiner? Have you paid him?"
+
+"He is going to be a devil. I hired two Irishmans for five dollars to
+meet him up the street, cut off his tail, break his horns, and put
+whitewash on his red suit. He is all right. I'll make it thirty
+dollars and a ticket of the raffle for my watch to-morrow."
+
+"Done," said Mr. Middleton, and he proceeded to draw up a contract
+binding him to stay away from the masquerade for a consideration of
+thirty dollars.
+
+It was not the least remarkable part of his adventure that he did not
+meet Gustaf Kleiner in his damaged suit and for a consideration of
+fifty dollars, lend him the magnificent Oriental costume. He did not
+see Gustaf Kleiner at all, nor did he win the watch in the raffle and
+the chronicler hopes that the setting down of these facts will not
+cause the readers to doubt his veracity, for he is aware that usually
+these things are ordered differently.
+
+Having kept the Oriental costume for several days and seeing no
+prospect of ever wearing it, and his small closet having become
+crowded by the presence of a new twenty-dollar suit which he purchased
+with part of his gains, he presented it to the young lady in Englewood
+previously mentioned, who reduced the ruby red jacket to a beautiful
+bolero jacket, made a table throw of the sash, and after much
+hesitation seized the exceedingly baggy trousers--which were made with
+but one seam--and ripping them up, did, with a certain degree of
+confusion, fashion them into two lovely shirt waists. But she did not
+wear them in the presence of Mr. Middleton and did not even mention
+them to him. Nor did Mr. Middleton allude to any of these transactions
+when on the appointed day and hour he again sat in the presence of the
+urbane prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Handing him a bowl of delicately
+flavored sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Adventure of William
+Hicks.
+
+
+
+
+_The Adventure of William Hicks._
+
+
+Young William Hicks was a native of the village of Bensonville, in the
+southern part of Illinois. Having, at the age of twenty, graduated at
+the head of a class of six in the village school, his father thought
+to reward him for his diligence in study by a short trip to the city
+of Chicago, which metropolis William had never beheld. Addressing him
+in a discourse which, while not long, abounded in valuable advice, Mr.
+Hicks presented his son with a sum of money sufficient for a stay of a
+week, provided it were not expended imprudently.
+
+One evening, William was walking along Wabash Avenue, feeling somewhat
+lonely as he soberly reflected that not one in all that vast multitude
+cared anything about him, when he heard himself accosted in a most
+cheery manner, and looking up, beheld a beautiful lady smiling at him.
+It was plain that she belonged to the upper classes. A hat of very
+large proportions, ornamented with a great ostrich plume, shaded a
+head of lovely yellow hair. She was clothed all in rustling purple
+silk and sparkled with jewelry. Her cheeks and lips glowed with a
+carmine quite unknown among the fair but pale damosels of Bensonville,
+which is situated in a low alluvial location, surrounded by flat
+plains, the whole being somewhat damp and malarial. William had never
+imagined eyes so wide open and glistening.
+
+"My name is Willy, to be sure. But you have the advantage of me, for
+ashamed as I am to say it, I cannot quite recall you. You are not the
+lady who came to Bensonville and stayed at the Campbellite
+minister's?"
+
+"Oh, how are all the dear folks in Bensonville? But, say, Will, don't
+you want to come along with me awhile and talk it all over?"
+
+"I should be honored to do so, if you will lead the way. I confess I
+am lonely to-night, and I always enjoy talking over old times."
+
+At this juncture, a sudden look of alarm spread over the lady's
+beauteous face and a lumbering minion of the law stepped before her.
+
+"Up to your old tricks, eh?" he growled. "Didn't I tell you that the
+next time I caught you tackling a man, I'd run you in? Run you in it
+is. Come on, now."
+
+"Oh, oh," panted the lady, and great tears welled into her adorable
+eyes. At that moment, there was a crash in the street, as a poor
+Italian exile had his push cart overturned by the sudden and
+unexpected backing of a cab. The policeman turned to look and, like a
+frightened gazelle, the lady bounded away, closely followed by young
+William.
+
+"Is there nothing I can do? Cannot I complain to the judge for you, or
+address a communication to some paper describing and condemning this
+conduct?"
+
+"Is he coming? Is he coming?" asked the lady, piteously.
+
+"No. But if he were, I would strike him, big as he is. Cannot a former
+visitor in Bensonville greet one of its citizens without interference
+from the police?"
+
+Hereupon the lady, who seemed to be giving little heed to what William
+was saying, beyond the information that the policeman was not in
+pursuit, gave a gay little laugh of relief, which caused William's
+eyes to light in pitying sympathy.
+
+"Now that we are away from him, what do you say to a friendly game of
+cards somewhere, to pass away the evening, which hangs heavy on my
+hands and doubtless does on yours?"
+
+"I have never played cards," said William, "for while there is nothing
+intrinsically wrong in them, they are the vehicle of much that is
+injurious, and at the very least, they cause one to fritter away
+valuable time in profitless amusement."
+
+"Oh, la! you are wrong there," said the lady, with a little silvery
+laugh. "They are not a profitless amusement. Why, a man has to keep
+his brains in good trim when he plays cards, and whist is just as good
+a mental exercise as geometry and algebra, or any other study where
+the mind is engaged upon various problems. You see I stand up for
+cards, for I teach whist myself and I assure you that many of the
+leading ladies of this city spend their time in little else than
+whist, which they would not do if cards were what you say. Before you
+pass your opinion, why not let me show you some of the fine points,
+and then you will have something to base your judgment upon."
+
+William, quite impressed by the elegance and social standing of the
+lady, as well as influenced by her beauty, despite her evident
+seniority of ten or fifteen years, assented, and the lady continued:
+
+"I would invite you to my own apartments, but they are so far away,
+and as we are now in front of the Hotel Dieppe, let us go up and
+engage a room for a few hours and I will teach you a few little
+interesting tricks with which you can amuse the people of Bensonville,
+and even obtain some profit, if you wish to. What do you say?"
+
+William averring that he would be pleased to receive the proffered
+instruction, she led the way up a flight of stairs and paused in the
+doorway of the hotel office, for the Hotel Dieppe was a hostelry of no
+great pretentions and occupied the upper stories of a building, the
+lower floors of which were devoted to a furniture emporium. Behind the
+counter stood a low-browed clerk with a large diamond in his shirt
+front, who scrutinized them keenly.
+
+"You get the room," said the lady, coyly. "I'm bashful and don't like
+to go in there where are all those smoking men. You may take it in my
+name if you wish,--Madeleine Montmorency."
+
+"Number 15," said the clerk, and in a space William found himself in a
+dark room, alone with the lady, and heard the door close behind them
+and the key turn in the lock.
+
+"We are locked in!" exclaimed Miss Montmorency.
+
+"What's that?" said a deep voice in the darkness.
+
+Miss Montmorency screamed, and screamed again as William turned on the
+light and they beheld a man lying in bed!
+
+William was stepping hastily to her side to shield her vision from
+this improper spectacle, when he paused as if frozen to the floor. The
+man was now sitting up in bed and he had a _red flannel night gown,
+one eye_, AND TWO NOSES!
+
+"What the devil are you doing here?" exclaimed the monster in the red
+flannel nightgown.
+
+"That I will gladly tell you, for I would not have you believe that we
+wantonly intruded upon your slumbers." And thereupon William related
+that he was a citizen of Bensonville who had met a former visitor
+there and they had come here to talk over mutual acquaintances and
+improve their minds by discreet discourse. "But, sir," he said, in
+concluding, "pardon my natural curiosity concerning yourself. Who are
+you and why are you?"
+
+"If I had the printed copies of my life here, I would gladly sell you
+one, but I left them all behind. My name is Walker Sheldrup. I am
+registered from Springfield, Mass., but I am from Dubuque, Iowa. I was
+born in Sedalia, Mo., where my father was a prominent citizen. It was
+he who led the company of men who, with five ox teams, hauled the
+courthouse away from Georgetown and laid the foundations of Sedalia's
+greatness. Had he lived, Sedalia would not have tried in vain to swipe
+the capital from Jefferson City. As a youth I was distinguished--but
+I'll cut all that out. Your presence here and the door being locked
+behind you only too surely warns me that we have no time to lose. They
+have taken you for the snake-eating lady and the rubber-skinned boy,
+who ran away when I did and who were to meet me here in Chicago. If
+you will turn your heads away so I can dress, I will continue. You
+have heard of prenatal influences. Shortly before I was born, my
+mother made nine pumpkin pies and set them to cool on a stone wall
+beneath the shade of a large elm. As luck would have it, a menagerie
+passed by and an elephant grabbed those pies one after another and ate
+them. The sight of that enormous pachyderm gobbling my mother's
+cherished handiwork, completely upset her. I was born with two noses
+like the two tusks of the beast. At the same time, like the trunk,
+they are movable. My two noses are as mobile and useful as two fingers
+and if you have a quarter with you, I will gladly perform some curious
+feats. My noses being so near together, ordinarily, I join them with
+flesh-colored wax. I then seem to have but one nose, although a very
+large one. I thus escape the annoying attention of the multitude,
+which is very disagreeable to a proud man of good family, like me.
+Young man, do you ever drink? In Dubuque, they got me drunk so I
+didn't know what I was about and I signed a contract with a dime
+museum company for twenty-five dollars a week. Take warning from my
+fate. Never drink, never drink."
+
+"I can well imagine your sufferings at being a spectacle for a ribald
+crowd," said William. "To a man of refined sensibilities, it must be
+excruciating, and it was an outrage to entrap you into such a
+contract."
+
+"I ought to have had seventy-five and could have got fifty. So I ran
+away. Well, now, how are we going to get out of here? Can you climb
+over the transom, young man?"
+
+As he said these words, the door flew open and in rushed some
+villainous looking men, who gagged, handcuffed, and shackled Miss
+Montmorency, William, and the two-nosed man.
+
+"We have the legal right to do this," said the leader, displaying the
+badge of the Jinkins private detective agency. "Advices from Dubuque
+set us at work. We early located Sheldrup at this hotel, and when the
+clerk saw the rubber-skinned boy and the snake-eating lady come in, he
+suspicioned who they was at once and by a great stroke, put 'em in
+with old two-nose. Do you think we are going to put you through for
+breach of contract and for swiping that money out of the till on the
+claim it was due you on salary? Nit. Cost too much, take too much
+time, and you git sent to jail instead of being back in the museum
+helping draw crowds. We are in for saving time and trouble for you,
+us, and your employer. To-night you ride out of here for Dubuque,
+covered up with hay, in the corner of the car carrying the new trick
+horse for the museum. Save your fare and all complications. Now, boys,
+we want to work this on the quiet, so we will just leave 'em all here
+until the streets are deserted and there won't be anybody around to
+notice us gitting 'em into the hack."
+
+"Hadn't one of us better stay?" asked a subordinate.
+
+"How can people gagged, their ankles shackled, their hands handcuffed
+behind 'em, git out? Why, I'll just leave the handcuff keys here on
+the table and tantalize 'em."
+
+Tears welled in the soft, beauteous orbs of Miss Montmorency and
+William's eyes spoke keen distress, but Mr. Sheldrup's eyes gleamed
+triumphantly above the cloth tied about the lower part of his face.
+Hardly had the steps of the detectives died away on the stair, when a
+little click was heard behind Miss Montmorency and her handcuffs fell
+to the floor. There stood Mr. Sheldrup, politely bowing, with the key
+held between his two noses. She seized it and in a twinkling, the
+bonds of all had been removed and, forcing the door, they started
+away. At the street entrance stood the policeman who had insulted Miss
+Montmorency!
+
+"Oh, he's waiting for me, and I'll get six months. He knew where I'd
+go. I haven't any money," and tears not only filled the wondrous
+optics of poor Miss Montmorency, but flowed down her cheeks.
+
+"Six months, your grandmother. I'll not go back on you. Young man,
+follow me into the office and when I am fairly in front of the clerk,
+give me a shove," and the two-nosed man, with a grip in each hand,
+walked up to the clerk and began to rebuke him for his ungentlemanly
+and unprincipled conduct.
+
+"You white-livered son of a sea-cook, you double-dyed, concentrated
+essence of a skunk," and at that moment young William pushed him and
+the two-nosed gentleman lurched forward, and bending his head to avoid
+contact with the clerk's face, it rested against the latter's bosom
+for a moment. Departing immediately, at the foot of the stairs the
+two-nosed gentleman said to the policeman:
+
+"Officer, please let this lady pass. For various reasons, I desire it
+enough to spare this stud, which will look well upon the best
+policeman on the force."
+
+"All right," said the policeman. "Go along for all of me, Bet
+Higgins," and he courteously accepted the diamond.
+
+"My stage name," said Miss Montmorency, in answer to an inquiring look
+from William. "The name I sign to articles in the Sunday papers."
+
+"Now of course they are watching all the depots," said the two-nosed
+gentleman. "Before they located me here they did that, and as they
+have also been looking for the snake-eating lady and the
+rubber-skinned boy, our late captors have not had time to notify them
+that we have been captured. It is useless to try to escape that way,
+then; it is too far to walk out, or go by street car, and as it is a
+fair, moonlight night with a soft breeze, I am for getting a boat and
+sailing out."
+
+After some search, they found a small sail boat. Miss Montmorency had
+decided to flee from the wicked city with the two-nosed gentleman. She
+had heard such delightful reports of Michigan. The owner of the boat
+not being there and there being no probability that they would ever
+return it, the two-nosed gentleman wrote a check on a Dubuque bank for
+one hundred and seventy-five dollars, and Miss Montmorency an order on
+the school board for a like amount, and these they pinned up where the
+boatman could find them.
+
+"It will be quite like a fairy tale when the good boatman comes in the
+morning and finds this large sum left him by those to whom his little
+craft has been of such inestimable service," said William, and then
+for fear the boatman might not find the check and the order, in two
+other places he pinned up cards giving the whereabouts of the
+remuneration for the boat and some statement concerning the
+circumstances of its requisition. On the back of one of the cards had
+been penciled his name and city address, and though he had erased the
+black of this inscription, the impression yet remained distinctly
+legible. This erasure was not due to any desire to conceal his
+identity or lodgings, but because he had thought at first that he
+could not get all the information on one side of the card. Having seen
+his friends go slipping out on the deep, he turned pensively homeward,
+somewhat heavy of heart, for when one faces perils with another, fast
+friendships are quickly welded.
+
+In the morning, young William was arrested and lodged in jail and a
+corrupt and venal judge laughed with contempt at his plea. After three
+long days in jail, came Mr. Hicks, senior, who compounded with the
+boat owner for two hundred and fifty dollars, the boat being, as the
+owner swore, of Spanish cedar with nickel-plated trimmings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"That is always the way when a person of good heart befriends
+another," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Alas, too often," said the emir of the tribe of Al-Yam. "But I am
+pleased to say that when once across the lake, the two-nosed gentleman
+married Miss Montmorency, who whatever she might be, did not lack
+certainly womanly qualities and had been the sport of an unkind world.
+Having something to live for, the two-nosed gentleman signed with a
+Detroit dime museum company at seventy-five dollars a week. His two
+noses were not the most remarkable thing about him, for in course of
+time hearing of young William's misadventure, he sent him a sum
+equivalent to all the episode had cost him, together with a handsome
+diamond stud, which he had with great deftness and cleverness taken
+from the officious policeman, as he visited the dime museum with two
+ladies while spending his vacation in Detroit. And this beautiful
+ornament William delighted to wear, not merely because of its
+intrinsic worth, which was considerable, but through regard for its
+thoughtful and considerate donor."
+
+"The two-nosed man did truly show himself a man of gratitude, and I am
+glad to hear of such an instance. Yet from what you said of him in the
+beginning of the tale, I should not have expected it of him. How often
+is one deceived by appearances and how hard it is to trust to them."
+
+"Even the wisest is unable to distinguish an enemy wearing the guise
+of a friend, but we may bring to our assistance the aid of forces more
+powerful than our poor little human intelligence. Let me present you
+with a talisman which will ever warn you when any one plots against
+you."
+
+"How?"
+
+"How? You must wait until some one plots against you and the talisman
+will answer that question. Its ways of warning will be as manifold as
+the plots villains may conceive. Here is the talisman, an Egyptian
+scarabaeus of pure gold. So cunningly fashioned is it that not nature
+itself made ever a bug more perfect in the outward seeming."
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+Putting the scarabaeus in his left trousers pocket, Mr. Middleton
+departed, and as he went about his affairs during the next several
+days, he ceased to think of the talisman, but on the fourth day his
+attention was recalled to it in a way that indeed seemed to prove that
+it was a charm possessed of the powers the emir of the tribe of Al-Yam
+had attributed to it. He was faring northward in a street car at
+eleven of the morning, diverting himself with the study of the
+passengers sitting opposite, when he became aware that the scarabaeus
+in his left trousers pocket was slowly traveling up his leg. Had the
+talisman been other than the heavy object it was, he would not have
+noticed it, but it was of too considerable weight to travel over his
+person without making its progress felt. Deterred by none of the
+superstitious tremors which the unaccountable peregrinations of the
+gold beetle would have excited in one less intrepid, he quickly thrust
+his hand into his pocket to close it over another hand already there,
+a hand which beyond a first little start to escape, lay passive and
+unresisting, a hand soft and delicate, yet well-muscled withal,
+long-fingered and finely formed. At the same time, a well-modulated
+voice at his side exclaimed:
+
+"Why, I did not recognize you at first. I was not looking when you
+came and you evidently did not notice me."
+
+"No, I did not," said Mr. Middleton, composedly, still retaining his
+grasp upon the hand in his pocket. "I cannot see that you have changed
+any," he continued, scrutinizing the young woman at his side, for she
+was young and, moreover, of a very pleasing presence, and he did not
+altogether rebel against the circumstances that allowed him to fondle
+the hand of one so comely. The day, which had begun with a slight
+chill, had turned off warm and she had removed her cloak, which, lying
+across her own lap and partially across Mr. Middleton's, had been the
+blind behind which she had introduced her hand into the pocket where
+reposed the fateful talisman.
+
+The persons in the car seemed to take an interest in this sudden
+recognition on the part of a pair who had been riding side by side for
+so long, oblivious of each other's identity. Moreover, the young woman
+was tastefully gowned and of a very smart appearance, while Mr.
+Middleton's new suit became him and fitted him nicely and altogether
+they were a couple nearly any one would find pleasure in looking upon.
+A slight movement to withdraw the hand lying within his own, caused
+Mr. Middleton's grasp to tighten and almost simultaneously, the young
+woman at his side leaned forward and with a look in which sorrow and
+pain were mingled, said in a lowered voice:
+
+"Oh, I have such a dreadful thing to tell you about our friend Amy. I
+hate to tell you, but as I wish to bespeak your kind offices, I must
+do so. I am going to ask you to be the agent of a restitution. She
+has, oh, she has become a kleptomaniac. With every luxury, with her
+fine home on the Lake Shore Drive, with all her father's wealth, with
+no want money can gratify, she takes things. In her circumstances it
+is out of the question to call it stealing. It is a mania, a form of
+insanity. When she is doing it, she seems to be in the grasp of some
+other mind, to be another person, and her actions are involuntary,
+unconscious. Then she seems to come to herself, when her agony is
+dreadful to behold."
+
+The young woman's voice broke a little here, she paused a moment to
+resume control of herself, and perceiving her eyes swimming with tears
+and her lips quivering with unhappiness, Mr. Middleton was penetrated
+with pity and pressed most tenderly and sympathetically the delicate
+hand of which he was temporarily custodian.
+
+"She took things in stores, trumpery, cheap things. She took magazines
+and penny papers from news stands. But oh, she descended to the
+dreadful depths of--oh, I can hardly tell it--she was detected in
+trying to pick a man's pocket. It is here that I wish to employ you as
+an agent of restitution, or rather retribution, I should say. Will you
+please take this ring off my left hand and take it to the man she
+tried to rob? I cannot use the fingers of my right hand owing to
+temporary incapacitation," and she held out to Mr. Middleton her left
+hand, upon the third finger of which gleamed a splendid ring of
+diamonds and emeralds. Mr. Middleton possessed himself of this second
+hand, but paused, and regarding the sweet face turned up to his so
+beseechingly, so piteously, said:
+
+"But that would be compounding a felony. And how do you know the man
+will not have her arrested anyway?"
+
+"The man is a gentleman and having heard her story, will not think of
+such a thing. You are to ask him to accept the ring not as a price for
+immunity from arrest, but as a punishment, a retribution to Amy. The
+loss of the ring, which she has commissioned me to get to this
+gentleman in some manner, will be a lesson she is only too anxious to
+give herself, a forcible reminder, as it were. Let me beg of you to
+undertake this commission."
+
+All the while, Mr. Middleton was retaining hold of both the hands of
+the sorrowful young woman. Had they been other than the soft and
+shapely hands they were, had they been hard and gnarled and large,
+long before would he, melted by compassion at the young woman's tale,
+have released her. But her very charms had been her undoing and
+because of her perfect hands, this tale has grown long. That he might
+have excuse in the eyes of the other passengers for holding the young
+woman's hand, Mr. Middleton removed the ring as he had been bidden,
+planning to return it shortly. As he removed the ring, he released the
+hand in his pocket and his plan was frustrated by the young woman
+starting up with the exclamation that she had passed her corner, and
+springing from the car. She was so far in advance of him, when he
+succeeded in getting off the car and was walking so rapidly, that he
+could not overtake her except by running, and he was averse to
+attracting the attention that this would occasion. So he determined to
+shadow her and ascertaining her residence, find some means of
+restoring the ring without the knowledge of her friends, as he had no
+desire to do anything which might cause them to learn of her
+unfortunate infirmity, especially, as this last experience might have
+worked a cure. She did indeed enter a stately mansion of the Lake
+Shore Drive--but by the back door.
+
+Pondering upon this episode, Mr. Middleton went to an acquaintance who
+kept a large loan bank on Madison Street, who, after discovering that
+he had no desire to pawn the ring, appraised it at seven hundred
+dollars.
+
+On the following evening, Mr. Middleton was replacing his new suit by
+his old, as was his custom when he intended to remain in his room of
+an evening. This example cannot be too highly commended to all young
+men. The amount which would be saved in this nation were all to
+economize in this way, would be sufficient to buy beer for all the
+Teutonic citizens of the large state of Illinois. As Mr. Middleton was
+changing his clothes, the scarabaeus dropped from his pocket and as he
+picked it up, a collar button fell from his neckband, and scrambling
+for it as it rolled toward the unexplored regions under his bed, he
+tripped and sprawled at full length, his nose coming in sharp contact
+with an evening paper lying on the floor. He was about to rise from
+his recumbent position, when his eyes, glancing along his nose to
+discover if it had sustained any injury, observed that said member
+rested upon a notice which read:
+
+    "Lost, a diamond and emerald ring. $800 will be paid for its
+    return and no questions asked.            David O. Crecelius."
+
+The address was that of the house on the Lake Shore Drive which the
+kleptomaniac had entered! Once more did the scarabaeus seem to be
+exerting its influence. But for the talisman, he would never have seen
+the notice, and a little shiver ran through him as he thought of this.
+Immediately he reclothed himself in his new suit.
+
+"There is time for me to think out a course of action between here and
+my destination," said he. "The walking so conducive to reflection can
+be much better employed in taking me toward the Lake Shore Drive, than
+in uselessly pacing my room, and I'll be there when I get through."
+
+As he traveled eastward, he engaged in a series of ratiocinative
+processes and the result of the deductive and inductive reasoning
+which he applied to the case in hand, was as follows:
+
+The kleptomaniac could hardly be a daughter of the house. She would
+have entered by the front door. If she were the daughter of the house,
+she would not have had the ring advertised for, counting herself
+fortunate to get out of the difficulty so cheaply. However, if her
+parents had noted the absence of the ring, she might have said it was
+lost and so they advertised, but nothing could have been further from
+her wishes, for there would be the great danger that the outcome of
+the advertisement would be a complete exposure. She could easily
+prevent her parents noticing the ring was gone, at least making
+satisfactory explanations for not wearing it. With her wealth, she
+could have it duplicated inside of a few days and her friends never
+know the original was lost. As this is what the daughter of the house
+in all probability would have done, the kleptomaniac could hardly have
+been the daughter of the house. He suspected that she was a lady's
+maid, who, wearing her mistress's jewelry, had purchased her way out
+of one difficulty at the risk of getting into another. The
+advertisement would seem to indicate that she was trusted. The
+disappearance of the ring was apparently not connected with her. The
+matter was very simple. He would hand over the ring and take the eight
+hundred dollars and need say nothing that would implicate the young
+woman, be she daughter of the house and kleptomaniac, or serving-maid
+and common thief. But one thing puzzled him. Why was the reward
+greater than the value of the ring?
+
+Eight hundred dollars. The young lady in Englewood was getting nearer.
+
+A bitter east wind was blowing as he walked up to the entrance of the
+mansion of Mr. David Crecelius. Behind him the street lay all deserted
+and the melancholy voice of the waves filled the air. Nowhere could he
+see a light about the house and he was oppressed by a feeling of
+undefinable apprehension as he pressed the bell. A considerable
+interval elapsing without any one appearing and a second and a third
+ringing failing to elicit any response from within the silent pile, he
+was about to depart, feeling greatly relieved that it was not
+necessary to hold parley with any one within the gloomy and forbidding
+edifice, when he heard a sudden light thud at his feet and discovered
+that the scarabaeus had dropped through a hole in his trousers' pocket
+which had at that moment reached a size large enough to allow it to
+escape. After a hurried search, he had possessed himself of the
+talisman and was about to depart, when the door swung open before him
+and a venerable white-haired man stood in a dim green glow. Boldly did
+Mr. Middleton enter, for had not the talisman delayed him until the
+venerable man opened the door?
+
+"Come in, sir, come in," said the venerable man, whom Mr. Middleton
+saw was none other than David O. Crecelius, the capitalist, whose
+portraits he had seen again and again in the Sunday papers and the
+weekly papers of a moral and entertaining nature, accompanying
+accounts of his life and achievements, with exhortations to the youth
+of the land to imitate them, advice which Mr. Middleton then and there
+resolved to follow, reflecting upon the impeccable sources from which
+it emanated.
+
+"All the servants seem to be gone. My family is abroad and the
+household force has been cut down, and I have given everybody leave to
+go out to-night, all but one maid, and she seems to have gone, too,"
+said Mr. Crecelius, leading Mr. Middleton into a spacious salon and
+seating him near where great portieres of a funereal purple moved
+uneasily in the superheated atmosphere of the house. At that moment, a
+voice from the hallway, a voice he had surely heard before, said:
+
+"Did some one ring? I am very sorry, but it was impossible for me to
+come," and Mr. Middleton was aware that some one was looking hard at
+the back of his head.
+
+"Yes. I let them in. It's no matter. Run away now."
+
+When Mr. Middleton had finished explaining the reason for his call and
+had fished up the ring, Mr. Crecelius did not, as he had expected he
+would, arise and make out a check for $800.
+
+"This ring," said that gentleman after a little pause, "have you it
+with you?"
+
+Mr. Middleton glanced at the hollow of his left hand. He had fished up
+the scarabaeus instead of the ring. But his left thumb soon showed him
+the ring was safe in his vest pocket. The delay and caution of Mr.
+Crecelius, and above all, the prevention of the immediate delivery of
+the ring caused by the scarabaeus coming up in its stead caused Mr.
+Middleton to delay.
+
+"It can be produced," said he.
+
+"How did you get it?"
+
+"It came into my possession innocently enough so far as I was
+concerned. As to the person from whom I received it, that is a
+different matter, but though I made no promises, I feel I am in honor
+bound not to disclose that person's identity."
+
+As he uttered these words, Mr. Middleton saw the portiere at his side
+rustle slightly. It was not the swaying caused by the currents of
+overheated air.
+
+"I will give you two hundred dollars more to tell me who gave you or
+sold you the ring."
+
+"I cannot do that."
+
+"Very well. I'll only give you four hundred dollars reward."
+
+"The ring is worth more than that."
+
+"If you retain it, or sell it, you become a thief."
+
+"You have advertised eight hundred dollars reward and no questions
+asked. I may have found it. Knowing of your loss through reading your
+advertisement, I may have gone to great trouble to recover it. At any
+rate, I have it. I deliver it. Your advertisement is in effect a
+contract which I can call upon you to carry out. The ring is not mine,
+but for my services in getting it, I am entitled to the eight hundred
+dollars you agree to give. You cannot give less."
+
+"Do you think it right to take advantage of my necessity in this way?
+You ought to accept less. The ring is not worth over seven hundred
+dollars. For returning it, three hundred dollars ought to be enough.
+It is wrong to drive a hard bargain by taking advantage of my
+necessity."
+
+"You have built your fortune on such principles. You have engineered
+countless schemes and your dollars came from the straits you reduced
+others to."
+
+"But do you think it right? What I may have done, does not justify
+you. I venture to say you and other young chaps have sat with heels
+cocked up and pipes in mouth and discussed me and called me a villain
+for doing what you are trying to do with me."
+
+"I have indeed. But that was in the past and I have changed my views
+materially. At present, I have the exclusive possession of the ability
+to secure something you very much want. You offered eight hundred
+dollars. Intrinsically, the ring is not worth it, but for certain
+reasons, possession of the ring is worth eight hundred dollars."
+
+"Possession of the ring! Certain reasons!" said Mr. Crecelius,
+springing to his feet and pacing up and down the room angrily. As Mr.
+Middleton was cudgelling his brains to find some reason for this
+outburst of anger, he became cognizant of a small piece of folded
+paper lying near his feet. He was about to pick it up and hand it to
+the financier, when he was stayed by the reflection that it might have
+dropped from his own pocket and examining it, read:
+
+    "It's his wife's ring. I wore it along with some of her other
+    things. Ten years ago, he gave it to another woman, and his wife
+    found it out and he had to buy it back. He is afraid his wife
+    will think he gave the ring away a second time. That is why I
+    dared give it to you. Make him give you a thousand.
+
+                                   "The One You Didn't Give Away."
+
+Mr. Middleton put the note in his pocket, and the eminent capitalist
+having ceased pacing and standing gazing at him, he remarked:
+
+"Certain reasons, such as preventing an altercation with your wife
+over her suspicions that you had not lost the ring, but had disposed
+of it as on a former occasion ten years since."
+
+"Young man, you cannot blackmail me. My wife knows all about that. The
+knowledge of that occurrence is worthless as a piece of blackmail."
+
+"As blackmail, yes; but not worthless as an indication of the extent
+you desire to regain possession of the ring. Your wife knows of your
+former escapade and that is gone and past. But the present
+disappearance of the ring will cause her to think you have repeated
+the escapade. This knowledge of certain conditions causes me to see
+that my services in securing and delivering the ring are worth one
+thousand dollars. Upon the payment of that sum, cash, I hand you the
+ring."
+
+The distinguished money-king gave Mr. Middleton a very black look and
+then left the room to return almost immediately with a thousand
+dollars in bills, which Mr. Middleton counted, placed in his vest
+pocket, and forthwith delivered the ring. As he did so, yielding to
+the pride with which the successful outcome of his tilt with the great
+capitalist inflamed him, he remarked with a condescension which the
+suavity of his tones could not conceal:
+
+"Had you, sir, employed in this affair the perspicacity you have
+displayed on so many notable occasions, it would have occurred to you
+that this ring, being of a common pattern, could be duplicated for
+seven hundred dollars and so you be saved both money and worry."
+
+A look of admiration overspread the face of the eminent manipulator,
+and grasping Mr. Middleton's hand with great fervor, he exclaimed:
+
+"A man after my own heart. I am always ready to acknowledge a defeat.
+You have good stuff in you. I must know you better. You must stay and
+have a glass of champagne with me. I will get it myself," and he
+hurried out of the room.
+
+In the state of Wisconsin, from which Mr. Middleton hailed, there is a
+great deal of the alcoholic beverage, beer, but such champagne as is
+to be found there is all due to importation, since it is not native to
+the soil, but is brought in at great expense from France, La Belle
+France, and New Jersey, La Belle New Jersey. Mr. Middleton had seen,
+smelled, and tasted beer, but champagne was unknown to him save by
+hearsay, and his improper curiosity and his readiness to succumb to
+temptation caused him to linger in the salon of Mr. Crecelius, thereby
+nearly accomplishing his ruin. Suddenly there was a patter of light
+steps across the floor, a hand fell lightly on his shoulder and a
+voice lightly on his ear.
+
+"You made him raving mad when you said what you did. He telephoned the
+police. Now he has gone for the wine and will try to hold you until
+they come."
+
+"But he cannot arrest me. I have done nothing," said Mr. Middleton,
+his heart going pit-a-pat, in spite of the boldness of his words.
+
+"He can make all sorts of trouble for you. Even if you did come out
+all right in the end, think of the trouble. Come, come quick!"
+
+A soft hand had grasped one of his and he was up and away, following
+his fair guide up stairs, through the house, and down into the
+kitchen.
+
+"I have recovered my wits a bit," said Mr. Middleton. "He is so angry
+that he has no thought but immediate vengeance, and so accordingly
+telephones the police, and if they were to catch me here, it certainly
+would be bad. But to-morrow he will be in a mood to appreciate the
+good sense of the letter I shall send him, calling his attention to
+the fact that if he arrests me, in the trial there must come out the
+reason why I demanded one thousand dollars, the story of his domestic
+indiscretion, and so he will not think of pursuing the matter
+further."
+
+"It was very kind and very noble of you not to expose me," said the
+young woman in a voice in which gratitude and sadness were mingled;
+"and all the admiration and gratitude a woman can feel under such
+circumstances, I feel toward you. To you I owe my continued good name
+and even my very freedom. I know that marriage with such as you, is
+not for such as me. I am going to ask you to give to her who would
+have all, but expects and deserves nothing, the consolation of a kiss.
+Whatever happy maiden may be so fortunate as to receive your love, I
+shall have treasured in memory the golden remembrance that once my
+preserver bestowed on me the symbol of love."
+
+Mr. Middleton looked down at the girl, supplicating for the favor her
+sex is wont to deny, and he said to himself that seldom had he seen a
+more flower-like face. Her lovely lips were already puckered in a rosy
+pout, her hands raised ready to rest on his shoulders as he should
+encircle her with his arms, when he noted with a start that her eyes,
+snapping, alert, and eager, were bent not upon his face, but upon his
+upper left hand vest pocket, where bulged the one thousand dollars in
+bills.
+
+"I am more than honored and I shall be ravished with delight to
+comply. But here, where we stand, we are exposed to view from three
+sides. If Mr. Crecelius were to look in and see you being kissed by
+me, whom he so dislikes, in what a bad plight you would be. Not even
+for the exquisite pleasure of kissing you would I subject you to such
+a danger. But in the shadow by the outer door, we would not be seen."
+
+As he said these words, Mr. Middleton placed the money in his inside
+vest pocket, buttoned his vest, buttoned his inner coat, and buttoned
+his overcoat, moving toward the outer door as he did so, the young
+woman following him more and more slowly, the light in her eyes dying
+with each successive buttoning. In fact, she did not enter into the
+shadow at all, and Mr. Middleton stepped back a bit when he threw his
+arms about her and pressed her to his bosom. Perfunctorily and coldly
+did she yield to his embrace, but whatever ardor was lacking on her
+part, was compensated for by Mr. Middleton, who clasped her with
+exceeding tightness and showered kisses upon her pouting lips until
+she pushed him from her, exclaiming with annoyance:
+
+"You've kissed me quite enough, you great big softy."
+
+Mr. Middleton said nothing of these transactions when on the ensuing
+evening he sat in the presence of the young lady of Englewood, nor did
+he, when on the evening thereafter he once more sat in the presence of
+the urbane prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of
+delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Adventure of
+Nora Sullivan and the Student of Heredity.
+
+
+
+
+_The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity._
+
+
+It was the time of full moon. As the orb of day dropped its red, huge
+disk below the western horizon, over the opposite side of the world,
+the moon, even more huge and scarcely less red, rose to irradiate with
+its mild beams the scenes which the shadows of darkness had not yet
+touched. Miss Nora Sullivan, a teacher in the public schools of the
+metropolis, sat upon the front porch of the paternal residence
+enjoying the loveliness of the vernal prospect and the balm of the
+air, for it was in the flowery month of June. Although the residence
+of Timothy Sullivan was well within the limits of the municipality of
+Chicago, one visiting at that hospitable abode might imagine himself
+in the country. From no part of the enclosure could you, during the
+leafy season, see another human habitation. A quarter of a mile down
+the road to the east, the electric cars for Calumet could be seen
+flitting by, but except at the intervals of their passing, there was
+seldom anything to suggest that the location was part of a great city.
+A quarter of a mile to the west, on the edge of a marsh--a situation
+well suited to such culture--lived a person engaged in the raising of
+African geese. As it is probable that you may never have heard of
+African geese, I will tell you that they are the largest of their
+tribe and that specimens of them often weigh as high as seventy
+pounds.
+
+The person engaged in the culture of African geese was Wilhelm
+Klingenspiel, a man of German ancestry, but born in this country. Miss
+Sullivan had often heard of him, she had even partaken of the left leg
+of an African goose, which leg he had given Mr. Sullivan for the
+Sunday dinner, but she had never seen him. As Wilhelm Klingenspiel was
+young and single and as no other man of any description lived in the
+vicinity, it is not strange that Nora, who was also young and single,
+should sometimes fall to thinking of Mr. Klingenspiel and wonder what
+manner of man he was.
+
+On this evening so attuned to romantic reveries, when the flowers, the
+birds, and all nature spoke of love, more than ever did Nora
+Sullivan's thoughts turn toward the large grove of trees to the
+westward in the midst of which Wilhelm Klingenspiel had his home and
+carried on his pleasant and harmless vocation of raising African
+geese. The evening song of the geese, tempered and sweetened by
+distance, came to her, accompanied by the most extraordinary booming
+and racketing of frogs which is to be heard outside of the tropical
+zone; for not only did Klingenspiel raise the largest geese on this
+terraqueous globe, but having, as a means of cheapening the cost of
+their production, devoted himself to the increasing of their natural
+food, by principles well known to all breeders he had developed a
+breed of frogs as monstrous among their kind as African geese are
+among theirs. By these huge batrachians was an extensive marsh
+inhabited, and battening upon the succulent nutriment thus afforded,
+the African geese gained a size and flavor which was rapidly making
+the fortune of Wilhelm Klingenspiel.
+
+Nora had often meditated upon plans for making the acquaintance of
+Wilhelm, but it was plain that he was either very bashful or so
+immersed in his pursuits as to be indifferent to the charms of woman,
+for he had never made an attempt to see Nora in all the six months she
+had been his neighbor, and she was well worth seeing.
+
+Accordingly, she decided that if she did not wish to indefinitely
+postpone making the acquaintance of the poulterer, she must take the
+initiative. Timothy Sullivan was a market gardener. Klingenspiel was
+not the only man in the neighborhood who grew big things. Mr. Sullivan
+was experimenting upon some cabbages of unusual size. He had started
+them in a hothouse during the winter. Later transferred to the garden,
+they had attained an amplitude such as few if any cabbages had ever
+attained before. In the pleasant light of the moon, even now was he
+engaged with the cabbages, pouring something upon them from a watering
+pot. As she watched her father, it occurred to Nora that she could
+find no more suitable excuse for visiting Mr. Klingenspiel than in
+carrying him some present in return for the goose's left leg he had
+presented her family for a Sunday dinner, and that there was no more
+appropriate present than one of the great cabbages.
+
+No sooner had her father gone in than, selecting the largest cabbage,
+she started off with it, putting it in a small push-cart, as it was so
+large as to be too heavy and inconvenient to carry. It was somewhat
+late to call, but the evening was so delightful that Wilhelm
+Klingenspiel could hardly have gone to bed. Proceeding on her way, as
+the road passed into the swampy land of Klingenspiel's domain, her
+attention was engaged by the fact that a most singular commotion was
+taking place among the giant batrachians at some remote place south of
+the road. Their ordinary calls had increased both in volume and
+frequency, and at intervals she heard the sound of crashing in the
+brake and brush, as if some objects of unheard of size were falling
+into the marsh. Looking in the direction whence the sounds came, she
+saw indistinct and vague against the night sky, an enormous rounded
+thing rise in the air and descend, whereupon was borne to her another
+of the strange crashings. These inexplicable sounds and the
+inexplicable sight would have frightened Miss Sullivan had she not the
+resources with which modern science fortifies the mind against
+credulity and superstition. The round object, she told herself, was
+some sudden puff of smoke on a railway track far beyond; the crashing
+was the shunting of cars, which things, coming coincidentally with a
+battle of the frogs, to an ignorant mind would appear to be a
+phenomenon in the immediate vicinity. Bearing in mind that this
+seemingly real, but impossible, phenomenon could only be due to a
+fortuitous concatenation of actual occurrences, Nora was not disturbed
+in her mind. Leaving her cart some little distance up the road, in
+order that she might not be seen in the undignified position of
+pushing it, she walked into Klingenspiel's front yard, bearing her
+gift.
+
+The two-story white house of Wilhelm Klingenspiel seemed to be
+deserted. Despite the genial season, every door was shut, and so was
+every window, so far as Nora could see, for if any windows were open
+down stairs, at least the blinds were shut. There were no blinds in
+the second story. Looking around in no little disappointment, she was
+astonished to see a row of sheds and fences in rear of the house had
+been demolished as if struck by a cyclone and that a goodly sized barn
+had departed from its normal position and with frame intact was lying
+on its side like a toy barn tipped over by a child. As she was gazing
+upon this ruinage and striving to conjecture what had caused it, she
+heard a voice, muffled and strange, yet distinctly audible, saying:
+
+"Ribot is running amuck, Ribot is running amuck," and looking up she
+beheld, darkly visible against the panes of an upper story window, a
+human form. As she looked, the form disappeared and presently a person
+rushed from the front door, hauled her into the house and upstairs,
+where she found herself still holding her cabbage and observing a
+short man of a full habit, with a round moon face, illuminated by a
+large pair of spectacles that sustained themselves with difficulty
+upon a very snub nose. He was nearly bald, yet nevertheless of a
+kindly, studious, and astute appearance. One did not need to look
+twice to see that Wilhelm Klingenspiel was a scholar.
+
+"What--what--what is the matter?" exclaimed Nora.
+
+"Ribot is running amuck."
+
+"Who is Ribot?"
+
+Klingenspiel was about to answer, when the whole air was filled with
+what one would have called a squeal if it had been one fiftieth part
+so loud, and over a row of willow bushes across the road leapt an
+astounding great creature, twice as large as the largest elephant, and
+Nora began to realize that her scientific deductions regarding the
+phenomenon in the swamp had been utterly erroneous. The creature was
+of an oblong build, rounded in contour, and its hide was marked by
+large blotches of black and rufous yellow upon a ground of white. With
+extreme swiftness the creature scurried down the road, its legs being
+so short in proportion to its body and moving with such twinkling
+rapidity that it seemed to be propelled upon wheels. The appearance of
+this strange monster and the appalling character of its squealing,
+caused Nora to tremble like a leaf, but the animal having departed, a
+laudable curiosity made her forget her fears, and she asked:
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"That was Ribot."
+
+"Who and what is Ribot?"
+
+"Ribot was a celebrated French scientist, an authority on the subject
+of heredity. You doubtless know something of the subject, how certain
+traits appear in families generation after generation. Accidental
+traits, if repeated for two or three generations, often become
+inherent traits. To show you to what a strange extent this is true, I
+will call your attention to the case of the ducal house of Bethune in
+France, where three successive generations having had the left hand
+cut off at the wrist in battle, the next three generations were born
+without a left hand."
+
+The erudite dissertation of Wilhelm Klingenspiel was here interrupted
+by the reappearance of the mottled monster, who, with a scream that
+filled the blue vault of heaven, rushed into the yard and paused
+before a mighty oak, whose sturdy trunk had stood rooted in that soil
+before the city of Chicago existed, before the United States was born,
+when Cahokia was the capital of Illinois and the flag of France waved
+over the great West. The flash of terrible white teeth showed in the
+moonlight as the monster gnawed at the base of the tree a few times
+and with a crash its leafy length lay upon the ground. Contemplating
+for a brief space the ruin it had wrought, the monster emitted another
+of its appalling screams and was off once more on its erratic, aimless
+course.
+
+"What in the world is this awful creature?" cried Nora.
+
+"The subject of heredity," resumed Klingenspiel, "is one of vast
+importance, and although its principles are well understood, man has
+hitherto not touched the possibilities that can be accomplished. The
+span of a man's life is so short that in selecting and breeding choice
+strains of animals, an individual can see only a comparatively small
+number of generations succeed each other. Suppose some one family had
+for two hundred years carried on continuous experiments in breeding
+any race of animals. What remarkable results would have been attained!
+Behold what remarkable results are attained in raising varieties of
+plants, where the swiftness of succeeding generations enables man to
+accomplish what he seeks in a very short time. Observing the
+difficulties that confront the animal breeder and wishing to see in my
+own lifetime certain results that might ordinarily be expected only in
+a duration of several lifetimes, I sought an animal which came to
+maturity rapidly, whose generations succeeded each rapidly. At the
+same time, I wanted an animal comparatively highly organized, a
+mammal, not a reptile."
+
+At this point, his instructive discourse was interrupted by the
+reappearance of the monster, which charged into the yard with its nose
+to the ground, following some scent, sniffing so loudly that the sound
+was plainly audible despite the closed window. After having hastened
+about the yard for a few moments it was off up the road to the
+eastward, still with nose to the ground, until coming to the push cart
+left at the roadside by Nora, it examined it carefully and then with a
+sudden access of unaccountable rage, fell upon it and demolished it,
+beating and chewing it into bits.
+
+Whatever celerity this terrible beast had exhibited before, was now
+completely eclipsed, as with nose to the ground, it rushed back to the
+yard, straight to the house, and rearing on its hinder quarters,
+placed its forelegs on the porch roof, which gave way beneath the
+ponderous weight. Not disconcerted by the removal of this support, the
+monster continued to maintain its sitting posture, looking in the
+window at the terrified persons beyond, snapping and gnashing its huge
+jaws in a manner terrible to hear and still more terrible to
+contemplate. Nora was partially reassured by observing that the
+animal's head was too wide to go through the window, but the hopes
+thus raised were dashed by Klingenspiel moaning:
+
+"He'll gnaw right through the house, he'll chew right through the
+roof. He'll get in. He has smelled that big cabbage and he'll get in."
+
+"In that case," remarked Nora, with decision, "I'll not wait for him
+to come in to get the cabbage, but throw it out to him," and raising
+the window, thrust out the cabbage, which having caught with a
+deftness unexpected in a creature of its bulk, the beast retired a
+short space and proceeded to eat with every appearance of enjoyment.
+
+"In Paris, a few years ago," resumed Klingenspiel, "one of the learned
+faculty that lend a well deserved renown to the medical department of
+that ancient institution, the University of Paris, discovered an
+elixir which used during the period of human growth--and even
+after--causes the stature to increase. By depositing an increased
+supply of the matter necessary to the formation of bones, the frame
+increases and the fleshy covering grows with it. You have doubtless
+read of this in the papers, as I have seen it mentioned there recently
+myself----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," interrupted Nora, "but I must know what that
+monster is. Please do not keep me in suspense any longer."
+
+"Allow me to develop my discourse in its natural sequence," said
+Klingenspiel. "I learned of this elixir at the time its originator
+first formulated it and as we were friends, I secured from him the
+formula----"
+
+"What is that animal?" cried Nora, seizing Klingenspiel's ear with a
+dexterity born of long experience in educational work, and lifting him
+slowly toward a position upon the points of his toes.
+
+"A guinea pig, a guinea pig, a guinea pig," howled the student of
+heredity.
+
+"You guinea, you," exclaimed Nora in incredulous amazement, and yet as
+she looked at the monster, which having finished the cabbage was
+crouching contentedly between two huge elms, she was struck by the
+familiarity of the markings and contour of the tremendous brute.
+Turning in such wise that of the appendices of his countenance it
+should be his short and elusive nose instead of his ears presented
+toward the grasp of the expert in the science of pedagogy,
+Klingenspiel continued.
+
+"Generations of guinea pigs succeed each other in less than three
+months. In less than ten months, a pair of guinea pigs become
+great-grandfather and great-grandmother. In a few years, heredity
+could here do what a century of breeding horses could not. I treated a
+pair of young guinea pigs with the elixir. Their growth was wonderful.
+Their children inherited the size of their parents and to this the
+elixir added, and so on, cumulatively, for successive generations. I
+kept only a single pair out of each brood and disposed of that pair as
+soon as the next generation became grown. I did this partly because I
+could thus conduct my experiment with greater secrecy. Besides, after
+the guinea pigs were large enough, I found considerable profit in
+selling their hides for leather. Unfortunately, the animal is unfit
+for food. My labors, therefore, were bent upon creating a breed of
+draught animals, creatures greater than elephants and with the agility
+of guinea pigs. A team of these guinea pigs would outstrip the fastest
+horse, though hauling a load of tons. The hide, too, would be
+extremely valuable. I had at last reached a size beyond which I did
+not care to go. Ribot and his mate were twice the bulk of elephants. I
+was now ready to establish a herd. But alas! Two days ago, the mate
+died. All my labors were for nothing. I had only the one enormous male
+left. All the connecting links between him and the first small
+ancestors are gone. But worse. As is often the case with male
+elephants when the mate dies, Ribot went mad, ran amuck. Hitherto
+docile and kind, as is the nature of the _Cavia cobaya_, vulgarly
+called guinea pig, this evening Ribot became as you have seen him. I
+have lost my labors. Momentarily I expect to lose my life."
+
+"What's the matter with it now? Look at it, look at it," exclaimed
+Nora.
+
+Ribot had rolled on his back and after giving a few feeble twitches of
+his great legs, remained without life, his legs pointing stiffly into
+the air.
+
+"He is dead," said Klingenspiel, and Nora was unable to tell whether
+relief and joy or regret and despair predominated in this utterance.
+"Ribot is dead. Our lives are saved, my experiment is ruined."
+
+Turning toward Nora and scrutinizing her attentively for the first
+time, he remarked, "How white your face is. The strain has been a
+dreadful one. It has driven all the color away from you." And then
+letting his eyes wander over her person until they paused upon her
+hands resting in the moonlight upon the top of the sash, "and how
+green your hands are. What can it be? Paris green," he said after a
+close examination. "It was that which killed Ribot."
+
+"I remember now. Father was sprinkling something on them. It is
+cabbage worm time."
+
+"I hope you will allow me to call," said Klingenspiel, and Nora
+graciously assenting, he continued: "I admire your beauty, I admire
+your many admirable qualities of head and heart, but above all, your
+decision, your great decision."
+
+"Oh, I don't think I showed much decision just because I threw the
+cabbage out."
+
+"I referred to your taking my ear and learning, out of its due order
+in the thesis I was expounding, what manner of beast Ribot was. Ribot
+killed two of my best African geese. They are, however, still fit for
+food. I am going to beg your acceptance of one."
+
+"We will have it for dinner to-morrow," said Nora, "and you must come
+over."
+
+"I shall be pleased to do so," said Klingenspiel, and that was the
+beginning of a series of visits to the home of Timothy Sullivan that
+resulted in the marriage of Miss Nora and Wilhelm Klingenspiel. The
+latter still raises African geese there in the vicinity of Stony
+Island, but he has made no more experiments with guinea pigs, for his
+wife will not hear to it.
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+"What an unpleasant surprise it must have been to Klingenspiel,"
+remarked the emir, when he had completed his narration, "to find all
+his fine experimenting in the science of heredity merely resulting in
+nearly accomplishing his own death."
+
+"His experience is not unique," said Mr. Middleton. "There is many an
+economic, social, political, or industrial change which is inaugurated
+with the highest hopes only to slay its author in the end."
+
+"We should indeed be careful what waves we set in motion, what forces
+we liberate," said the emir thoughtfully. "And I have been, too. I
+have in my possession a constant reminder to be cautious in all my
+enterprises and undertakings--a monitor forever bidding me think of
+the consequences of an action, weigh its possible results. It has been
+in my family for generations. I believe that our house has learned the
+lesson. I would be glad to give it to some one who, perchance, has
+not. If it so happens that you are in no need of such a warning, you
+can perhaps present it to some one else who is." And having said a few
+words to Mesrour in the language of Arabia, the blackamore brought to
+him a small case and, from the midst of wrappings of dark green silk,
+he produced a flask of burnished copper that shone with the utmost
+brilliance. Handing this to Mr. Middleton and that gentleman viewing
+it in silence for some time and exhibiting no other emotion than a
+mild curiosity, largely due to its great weight, a ponderosity
+altogether out of proportion to its size, the emir exclaimed in a loud
+voice:
+
+"Do you know what you are holding?" and without waiting for an answer
+from his startled guest, continued: "Observe the inscription upon the
+side and the stamp of a signet set upon the seal that closes the
+mouth."
+
+"I perceive a number of Arabic characters," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Arabic!" said the emir. "Hebrew. You are looking upon the seal of the
+great Solomon himself and that is the prison house of one of the two
+evil genii whom the great king confined in bottles and cast into the
+sea. In that collection of chronicles which the Feringhis style the
+Arabian Nights, you have read of the fisherman who found a bottle in
+his net and opened it to see a quantity of dark vapor issue forth,
+which, assuming great proportions, presently took form, coalesced into
+the gigantic figure of a terrible genii, who announced to his
+terrified liberator that during his captivity, he had sworn to kill
+whomsoever let him out of the bottle. This well-known occurrence and
+stock example of the necessity of being careful of the possible
+results of one's acts, is so familiar to you as to make its further
+relation an impertinence on my part. Suffice it to say, in cause you
+have forgotten a minor detail, there was another genii and another
+bottle in the sea beside the one found by the fisherman.
+
+"The second bottle in some unknown way came into the possession of
+Prince Houssein, brother of my great-grandfather's great-grandfather,
+Nourreddin. This latter prince having need of a certain amount of
+coin--which was very scarce in Arabia at that time and of great
+purchasing power, trade being carried on by barter--sent to his
+brother a request for a loan. The country was in a very disturbed
+state at that time and Houssein dispatched two messengers at an
+interval of a day apart. The first of these was robbed and killed. He
+bore a letter, concealed in his saddle, and the money. The second
+messenger came in entire safety with that bottle, for no one could be
+desirous of trifling with anything so fraught with danger as that
+prison house of the terrible genii. What was the purport of this
+strange gift has never been guessed. The letter borne by the murdered
+man doubtless explained. Houssein himself perished of plague before
+Nourreddin could learn from him."
+
+Mr. Middleton sat holding the enchanted bottle very gingerly. If he
+had not feared to give offence to the emir, he would have declined the
+gift, for while not for one moment did he dream that a demoniac
+presence fretted inside that shining copper, he did believe that it
+contained some explosive, or what would be more probable, some
+mephitic substance that gave off a deadly vapor. So, fully resolved to
+throw the bottle into the river and being very heedful of Achmed's
+injunction not to let the leaden plug bearing Solomon's seal be
+removed from the mouth, he placed the gift in his pocket and having
+thanked the emir for his entertainment and instruction and the gift,
+he departed.
+
+When Mr. Middleton had stepped into the street, he altered his
+resolution to immediately dispose of the bottle. He was tired and did
+not care to walk to the river. Nor did he wish to ride there and
+alight, spending two car fares to get home. So postponing until the
+morrow the casting into the Chicago River of the unhappy genii who had
+once reposed on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, he boarded a car for
+home.
+
+The bulk and weight of the bottle sagging down his pocket and
+threatening to injure the set of his coat, Mr. Middleton held his
+acquisition on his knee. A tall, serious-looking individual was his
+seat mate, who after regarding the bottle intently for some time,
+addressed him in a low, but earnest voice.
+
+"Pray pardon my curiosity, but I am going to ask you what that queer
+receptacle is."
+
+"It is the prison-house of a wicked genii, who was shut therein by
+King Solomon, the magic influence of whose seal on the plug in the
+mouth retains him within, for what resistance could the physical force
+of those copper walls oppose to the strength of that mighty demon?"
+
+Of these words did Mr. Middleton deliver himself, though he knew they
+must sound passing strange, but on the spur of the moment he could not
+think what else to say and he hoped that the belief he would create
+that his mind was affected would relieve him of further questioning,
+for if put to it and pinned down, what could he say, what plausible
+account could he give of the bottle? To his surprise, the stranger
+gave no evidence of other than a complete acceptance of his statement
+and continuing to make inquiries in a most respectful and courteous
+way, Mr. Middleton felt he could not be less mannerly himself, and so
+he related all he knew of the bottle, avowing his belief that it
+contained some dangerous chemical, such as that devilish corroding
+stuff known as Greek fire, or some deadly gas.
+
+"Your theory sounds reasonable," said the stranger; "and yet who
+knows? That inscription certainly is Hebrew. At least, it is neither
+English nor German. When one has studied psychic phenomena as long as
+I have, he comes to a point where he is very chary of saying what is
+not credible. Do I not, time and again, materialize the dead, calling
+from the winds, the waters, and the earth the dispersed particles of
+the corporeal frame to reclothe for a little time the spiritual
+essence? Could not the great Solomon do as much? Is it not possible
+that that great moral ensamplar, guide, saint, and prophet has
+imprisoned in that bottle some one of the Pre-Adamite demons? I am not
+afraid to open the bottle, on the contrary, would be glad to do so. I
+am a clairvoyant and trance-medium, with materialization as a
+specialty. My name is Jefferson P. Smitz. Here is my card. I have a
+seance to-morrow night. Bring your bottle then, and I will open it.
+The price of admission is," he said, with a glance of tentative
+scrutiny, "one dollar," at which information Mr. Middleton, looking
+unresponsive, uninterested, not to say sulky, he continued: "but as
+you will bring such an important and interesting contribution to the
+subject of inquiry for the evening, we will make the admission for you
+only fifty cents, fifty cents."
+
+On the following evening, Mr. Middleton and his bottle sat among a
+circle of some thirty persons who were gathered in the gloomy,
+lofty-ceiled parlor of Mr. Smitz. Before forming the circle, Mr. Smitz
+had addressed the company in a few well-chosen words, saying that a
+like purpose had brought all there that night, that as votaries of
+science and devotees of truth and persons of culture and refinement,
+mutual acquaintance could not but be pleasant as well as helpful,
+enabling those who sat together while witnessing the astounding and
+edifying phenomena they were soon to behold, to discuss these
+phenomena with reciprocal benefit--in view of all this, he hoped
+everybody would consider themselves introduced to everybody else.
+
+Mr. Middleton, quickly inspecting the assemblage, whom he doubtless
+with great injustice denominated a crowd of sober dubs and solemn
+stiffs, so maneuvered that when all had drawn their chairs into a
+circle, a man deaf in the right ear sat at his left, while at his
+right sat a tall young lady, who though slightly pale was of an
+interesting appearance, notwithstanding. The somewhat tragic cast of
+her large and classic features was intensified by a pair of great
+mournful eyes and a wistful mouth, the whole framed in luxuriant
+masses of black hair, and altogether she was a girl whom one would
+give a second and third glance anywhere.
+
+It developing in their very first exchange of remarks that she had
+never been present at a seance and that she could not look forward to
+what they were about to witness without great trepidation, Mr.
+Middleton offered to afford her every moral support and such physical
+protection as one mortal can assure another when facing the unknown
+powers of another world. At the extinguishment of the gas, he took her
+left hand, and finding it give a faint tremor, he took the other and
+was pleased to note that, so far as her hands gave evidence, thereupon
+her fears were quite allayed.
+
+A breeze, chill and dank as the breath of a tomb, blew upon the
+company, and from the deep darkness into which they all stared with
+straining, unseeing eyes, came the solemn sound of Mr. Smitz, speaking
+hurriedly in somber tones in some sonorous unknown tongue, and low
+rustlings and whirrs and soft footfalls and faint rattlings that grew
+stronger, louder, each moment, swelling up into the stamp of a mailed
+heel and the clangor of arms as Mr. Smitz scratched a match and the
+light of a gas jet glanced upon helmet, corslet, shield, and greaves
+of a brazen-armored Greek warrior, standing in the middle of the
+circle, alive, in full corporeal presence!
+
+"Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae!" shouted Mr. Smitz, and then continued
+at a conversational pitch, "if any of you wish to speak to him in his
+own language, you have full permission to do so."
+
+Those present lacking either the desire to accost the dread presence,
+or a command of the ancient Greek, after a bit Mr. Smitz turned off
+the gas and the noises that had heralded the visitant's appearance
+began in reverse order, and at their cease, the gas being turned on
+again, there was the circle quite bare of any evidence that a Greek
+warrior in full panoply had but now stood there.
+
+At these prodigies, the young lady trembled, but you could have
+applied all sorts of surgical devices for measuring nerve reaction to
+Mr. Middleton from the crown of his head to where his parallel feet
+held between them the copper bottle, and not have detected a tremor.
+
+Mr. Smitz was reaching up to extinguish the gas once more, when a big,
+athletic blonde man, whose appearance and garb proclaimed him an
+Englishman, interrupted him.
+
+"I am going to request you to materialize the spirit with whom I wish
+to converse, the next time. I have to catch a train at eleven and
+there are a number of things I would like to do before that.
+Yesterday, you promised me that you would materialize him first
+thing."
+
+"Yesterday," said Mr. Smitz with a slight hauteur, "I could not look
+forward and see that I was to have such a large and cultivated
+gathering. You cannot, sir, ask to have your own mere personal
+business, for business it is with you, take precedence of the
+scientific quests of all these other ladies and gentlemen. I have
+planned to materialize men of many nations, with whom all may converse
+if they please; Confucius, the great Chinese; Caesar, the great Roman;
+Mohammed, the great Turk; Powhattan, the great Indian, and others.
+Your business must wait."
+
+"My friends," said the Englishman, appealing to the assemblage, "I
+throw myself upon your good nature. My grandfather was the owner of a
+small estate in Ireland. In a rebellion, the Irish burned every
+building on the place and it has since been deserted. He had buried a
+sum of money before he fled during the rebellion and we have a chart
+telling where it was buried. But the chart referred to buildings and
+trees that were subsequently utterly destroyed. We have no marks to
+guide us. I am sadly in need of money. My grandfather's ghost could
+tell me where the treasure is. I shall suffer financial detriment if I
+do not catch the train at eleven and must attend to several matters
+before that. You have heard my case. May I not ask you all to grant me
+the indulgence of having my affair disposed of now?"
+
+Mr. Middleton and several others were about to endorse the justice of
+the Englishman's request, when Mr. Smitz hastily forestalled them by
+saying that all should be heard from and turning to four personages
+who sat together at a point where the line of chairs of the circle
+passed before a large and mysterious cabinet set in the corner of the
+wall, and asking their opinion, they all four in one voice began to
+object to any alteration of the program of the evening, adverting
+somewhat to the Boer War, the oppressions in Ireland, and to the
+Revolution and the War of 1812. When they had done, there was no one
+who cared to say a word for the Englishman or an Englishman, and Mr.
+Smitz announced that Confucius would be the next materialization and
+that all might address him in his native tongue. Of this permission, a
+small red-head gentleman, whose demeanor advertised him to be in a
+somewhat advanced state of intoxication, availed himself and remarked
+slowly:
+
+"Hello, John. Washee, washee? Sabe how washee? Wlanter be Melican
+man?"
+
+To this the great sage vouchsafed no reply save a contemptuous stare,
+and the red-headed gentleman observed that doubtless the Chinese
+language had changed a good deal in two thousand years. All languages
+did.
+
+From out the darkness under whose cover the Chinaman was modestly
+divesting himself of his body, came the voice of Mr. Smitz, rich,
+unctuous, saying:
+
+"The next visitant will be from that great race we all admire so much,
+the noble race which has done so much to build up this country, which
+in every field of American endeavor has been a guiding star to us all.
+It gives me great pleasure to tell you that our next visitant from the
+world beyond is that great soldier, statesman, and patriot, King Brian
+Boru."
+
+"Who the devil wants to see that or any other paddy?" exclaimed the
+voice of the Englishman, choleric, savage. "Let me out of this
+blarsted, cheating hole. Who wants to see one of that race of
+quarrelsome, thieving, wretched rapscallions?"
+
+Whack! Smash! Bang! Crash! The assemblage was thrown into a pitiable
+state of terror by a most extraordinary combat and tumult taking place
+somewhere in the circle. The remonstrances of Mr. Smitz and the oaths
+of the Englishman rose against the general din of the expostulations
+of the men and cries of the women. Match after match was struck by the
+men, only to be blown out by some mysterious agency, after giving
+momentary glimpses of the Englishman astride of a man on the floor,
+pummelling him lustily, while Mr. Smitz pulled at the Englishman's
+shoulders. At length the noise died away, the sound of some one
+remonstrating, "let me at him oncet, let me at the spalpeen, he got me
+foul," coming back from some remote region of the atmosphere, as under
+the compelling force of the will of the great Smitz, the bodily
+envelope of the Irish hero was dissipated and his soul went back to
+the beyond.
+
+Then did a match reach the gas without being blown out. Beneath the
+chandelier stood Mr. Smitz and the four personages who had sat before
+the cabinet and had views on the Boer War.
+
+"What an awful, sacrilegious thing you have done," exclaimed Mr.
+Smitz. "You have struck the dead."
+
+"He hit me first."
+
+"Your remarks about the Irish angered him. He could not restrain
+himself."
+
+"Well, he couldn't whip me. Next time you materialize him, he'll show
+a black eye. Let me out of here, you cheat, you imposter, you and your
+pals, or I'll fix you as I did Brian Boru."
+
+Though the company did not take the Englishman's view, they were all
+anxious to go. They were quite unstrung by what had occurred, this
+combat between the living and the dead. They looked with horrified awe
+at the spot where it had taken place. There stood the living
+combatant, still full of the fire of battle. Him whom he had fought
+was gone on the winds to the voiceless abodes of the departed, a
+breath, a shadow, a sudden chill on the cheek and nothing more. For a
+brief space resuming his old fleshly habitude, with it had come the
+cholers and hatreds of the flesh and once more he avenged his
+country's wrongs.
+
+"Say," said the Englishman, with a malign look on his face, as he
+paused in the door, "if you've got that mick patched up any down in
+the kitchen, I'll give him another chance, if he wishes. Tell him to
+pick a smaller man next time."
+
+To this, Mr. Smitz made no reply, but flashed a look that would have
+frozen any one less insolent and truculent than the Englishman.
+
+All this time Mr. Middleton had been very agreeably employed in a
+corner of the room, for the young lady in an access of terror had
+thrown herself into his arms and there she had remained during the
+whole affrighting performance. To forerun any possible apprehension
+that he was going to extricate himself and leave her, he held her with
+considerable firmness, whispering encouragement into her ear the
+while. Preparing to accompany her home, he had almost left the room
+before he bethought him of the copper bottle, which he had abandoned
+when springing up to get the young lady out of the circle and away
+from danger. He soon found it lying against the wall, whither it had
+rolled or been kicked during the melee.
+
+The young lady continuing to be in a somewhat prostrated state after
+her late experience, on the way home Mr. Middleton supported her by
+his right arm about her waist, while she found further stay by resting
+her left arm across his shoulders, she being a tall young lady. Their
+remaining hands met in a clasp of cheer and encouragement on his part,
+of trusting dependence on hers. Arriving at her door in this fashion,
+it was but natural for Mr. Middleton--who was a very natural young
+man--to clasp her in a good-night embrace, but upon essaying to put
+the touch of completion to these joys which a kiss would give, she
+drew away her head, saying:
+
+"Why, how dare you, sir! I never met you before. Why, I haven't even
+been formally introduced to you."
+
+Mr. Middleton humbly pleading for the salute, she continued to express
+her surprise that he should prefer such a request upon no acquaintance
+at all, that he should even faintly expect her to grant it, and so on,
+all the while leaning languishing upon his breast with all her weight.
+Whereupon Mr. Middleton lost patience and with incisive sarcasm he
+began:
+
+"One would think that you who refuse this kiss were not the girl who
+stands here within my arms, my lips saying this into her ears, her
+cheek almost touching mine. Doubtless it is some one else. Pray tell
+me, what great difference is there between kissing a stranger and
+hugging him."
+
+At these brutal, downright words, leaving the poor young thing nothing
+to say, no little pretence even to herself that she had guarded the
+proprieties, had comported herself circumspectly, leaving her with not
+even a little rag of a claim that she had conducted herself with
+seemly decorum, she sprang from him and began to cry. Whatever the
+cause, Mr. Middleton could not look upon feminine unhappiness with
+composure and here where he was himself responsible, he was indeed
+smitten with keen remorse and hastening to comfort her, gathered her
+into his arms and there he was abasing and condemning himself and
+telling her what a dear, nice girl she was--and kissing away her
+tears.
+
+"Let me give you a piece of advice," he said, fifteen minutes later,
+as he was about to release her and depart. "It is not best ever to let
+a man hug you. Never," he said, pausing to imprint a lingering kiss
+upon the girl's yielding lips, "never let a man kiss you again until
+that moment when you shall become his affianced wife."
+
+Mr. Middleton departed in that serene state of mind which the
+consciousness of virtue bestows, for he had given the young woman
+valuable advice that would doubtless be of advantage to her in the
+future and he reflected upon this in much satisfaction as he fared
+away with the eyes of the young woman watching him from where she
+looked out of the parlor window.
+
+Reaching into his right coat pocket to transfer the copper bottle to
+the opposite pocket, in order that his coat might not be pulled out of
+shape, as he grasped the neck, one of his fingers went right into the
+mouth! The seal of Solomon was gone! A less resolute and quick-witted
+person might have been alarmed, but reasoning that the seal must have
+been knocked off during the fight at Mr. Smitz's and nothing had
+happened since, he boldly examined the bottle. He could see a white
+substance as he looked into it, and by the aid of a stick he fished
+out a wad of wool tightly stuffed in the neck. A metallic chinking
+followed the removal of the wadding and set his heart thumping
+rapidly. He looked up and down the street. No one in sight. He tilted
+the bottle up to the light of a street lamp and saw a yellow gleam. He
+shook it and into his hands flowed a stream of gold sequins! He could
+not sufficiently admire the ruse of Prince Houssein. Money on the
+first messenger there had been none.
+
+In a center more given to numismatics, or had he been willing to wait
+and sell the coins gradually, Mr. Middleton might have secured more
+than he did for the gold pieces, all coined at Bagdad in the early
+caliphates and very valuable. But he disposed of them in a lump to a
+French gentleman on La Salle Street for fourteen hundred and
+twenty-five dollars.
+
+Calling on the young lady of Englewood within the next few days, he
+made no reference to these events, though she asked him several times
+during the evening what he had been doing lately. He did, however,
+hint at having profited by a certain fortunate "deal," as he called
+it, but not a word did he say concerning the mournful girl or anything
+remotely connected with her.
+
+Hesitating to hurt the emir's feelings by exposing the obtuseness of
+his ancestor Noureddin and the foolish superstition of his descendants
+ever since, Mr. Middleton said nothing of these transactions when once
+more he sat in the presence of the urbane and accomplished prince of
+the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored
+sherbet, the emir began the narration of The Pleasant Adventures of
+Dr. McDill.
+
+
+
+
+_The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill._
+
+
+It was twelve o'clock on a blustery winter night and Dr. James McDill
+was where a married man of forty ought to be at such an hour in that
+season, sleeping soundly by the side of his beloved wife. But his wife
+was not sleeping. At the stroke of the hour, she had suddenly awoke
+from refreshing slumber and become aware of sounds as of persons
+moving softly about the room, and after a little, seeing against the
+windows faintly illuminated by a distant street light, two dark
+figures, she perceived her ears had not deceived her. Shaking her
+husband unavailingly for a considerable time, in her terror she
+finally cast discretion to the winds and shouted:
+
+"Burglars, Jim, burglars!"
+
+Hardly had these words ceased, when the electric lights were turned on
+and Dr. McDill sat up in bed to find himself staring into the muzzles
+of three revolvers, held by two masked men, who stood looking over the
+footboard. Bidding them move at their peril, the man with two
+revolvers remained to guard the doctor and his wife, while the other
+began to ransack the room. As he did so, he carried on an easy, if not
+eloquent, dissertation upon the rights of man and the iniquitous
+conditions which made it necessary for the poor and oppressed to
+obtain by force, if they obtained at all, any share in the privileges
+and riches of the wealthy. As he discoursed, at times carried away by
+his theme, he gave over his search and paused to enforce his points
+with earnest gestures. This caused the other robber some disquietude
+and he cursed his compatriot and the doctor and his wife with a use of
+epithets that will not bear repeating and which showed him to be none
+other than a low ruffian. At last all the treasure in the room being
+taken and the doctor being forced to accompany them and disclose the
+repository of other valuables, the robbers took their departure.
+
+Some weeks after this, two persons suspected of being responsible for
+certain robberies were taken into custody and the doctor called into
+court to identify them if possible.
+
+"I noticed," said he, "that the shorter of the two masked men was
+prone to gesticulation and that he had a fashion of holding his arms
+close to his body, as if tied at the elbows, and with hands fully
+open, fingers apart, thumbs extended, and palms upward, waving his
+forearms----"
+
+At this juncture, the smile on the face of the defendant's counsel,
+occasioned by thus putting his client upon his guard, was dispelled by
+an angry exclamation from the person in question, and denying with
+some loquacity and even more vociferation that he ever made such a
+gesture, at the close of his statement, behold, he made the gesture!
+
+By the doctor's testimony was a chain of incriminating evidence
+established that led to a sentence of ten years' imprisonment being
+imposed upon the robbers. When he had heard the sentence, he of the
+gestures turned fiercely toward the doctor and cried:
+
+"You'll be killed for this, like other dogs before you for the same
+cause. If you're not killed before I am discharged or escape, I'll
+kill you. But I am only one of many, a tried band who avenge;" and
+hereupon he smote the rail in front of him, "Knock, knock--knock;
+knock, knock--knock." And from several parts of the silent room came
+answers, faint, but distinct, two quick taps, a pause, and a third,
+then all repeated. "Tap, tap--tap; tap, tap--tap."
+
+The evidence of confederates, the quick response to the appeal of
+their comrade, the taps that came from everywhere and nowhere,
+manifestation of the desperate men surrounding him, might well have
+daunted the soul of any man. Three sentences had been pronounced that
+day, a term of years upon Jerry McGuire and Barry O'Toole, but death
+upon James McDill. You may depend upon it that the doctor was none the
+more reassured when on the morrow he learned that McGuire and O'Toole
+had escaped. With their anger and resentment yet hot within them,
+these men would doubtless at once set about to encompass his
+destruction, and he knew that when once one of these societies had
+decreed the death of a person who balked or incensed them, every
+endeavor was used to put the decree into effect. But, after a little,
+he took courage from the very fact that was most threatening. If these
+men, these desperate and despicable scoundrels, could escape from the
+barriers of stone and steel and the guardians that surrounded them,
+why might not he fight for his life and win in the struggle which both
+reason and instinct told him was inevitable?
+
+That those he loved most might not be involved in the perils he felt
+certain he was about to encounter and that his resolution and his
+movements might not be hampered by their presence and their fears, he
+found means to persuade his wife to take the children for a visit to
+their grandfather, and setting his affairs in order and providing
+himself with two revolvers, a bowie knife, and an Italian stiletto, he
+even began to look forward to the approaching struggle with something
+of that pleasure which man experiences in the anticipation of any
+contest; and there is indeed a certain keen zest in playing the game
+where one's stake is one's life.
+
+On the evening of the day of his wife's departure, he was called to
+assist in an operation at a hospital with which he had once been
+connected, and unexpected complications arising, it was not until two
+in the morning that he started away. His man and carriage, that he had
+ordered to await him, had gone. The night was mild and it must have
+been weariness or restiveness, that had caused the departure. Although
+some distance lay between the hospital and his home, he started afoot.
+Not a soul was to been seen in the street, which, thanks to the light
+of the moon late rising in its last quarter, lay visible to his sight.
+As he passed an alleyway, shortly after leaving the hospital, his
+attention was attracted by the sound of snores, and he discovered a
+man whose features were well shrouded in the upturned collar of an
+ulster, seated with his back against a house wall, asleep. The man
+stirred uneasily as he bent over him, but thinking it best not to
+disturb him, the doctor passed on. As he did so, he became conscious
+that the snores had ceased, and looking back, he beheld the man walk
+drowsily across the sidewalk and finally stand gazing in the direction
+of the hospital. The doctor began to hasten his steps, but ever and
+anon glancing back, and presently he saw the man was now looking after
+him, that he leaned to the right and leaned to the left, and stooped
+down in his scrutinizing. Suddenly the man reached forward with a
+cane, smote the sidewalk, "rap, rap--rap; rap, rap--rap," and taken up
+on either side of the way, louder and louder as it came up the street
+toward the now fleeing doctor, from sequestered nooks between
+buildings, ran the fateful, hurrying volley of "rap, rap--rap; rap,
+rap--rap." The last raps came right behind the doctor's heels at the
+mouth of an alley he was clearing at a bound, and glancing back, he
+saw a succession of men hurrying silently after him at all speed. He
+was encumbered with a long ulster, while his pursuers, if they had
+worn overcoats, had now cast them aside. The man just behind,
+apparently did not wish to close in alone, preferring to allow others
+to catch up and assist him, and at the second block the doctor could
+hear two pairs of heels behind him and a third pair just beyond. The
+pursuers were gaining. Though he would have to pause to do it, he must
+throw off his overcoat. At the third corner, he tore at the long
+garment, it swung under his feet, and he pitched headlong----. He
+heard a cry of savage joy and a rush of feet, a sudden great soft
+whirr, and he arose to see an automobile halted between him and his
+pursuers. A gentleman of a rotund person, clothed in correct evening
+dress and whose speech was of a thickness to indicate recent
+indulgence in intoxicating liquors, alighted from the carriage.
+
+"I do not believe thish ish the place. No, thish ish not the place I
+told you to come to, driver. I'm glad it isn't anyway, as I'm afraid
+we're too drunk to sing a serenade. Here's another man as's drunk,
+too. So drunk he fell down on hisself. Couldn't leave him here. Never
+go back on a man as is drunk. Get in brother. Take you home with us.
+Get in."
+
+It is needless to say that Dr. McDill responded to his invitation with
+the greatest alacrity and gratitude. For the first time did the rotund
+gentleman become aware that there were other persons present. Some
+four of the doctor's pursuers had now gathered at the curb of the
+crossing and the rest were coming thither, though with no great haste,
+for they were gentry to whom caution was second nature and it was by
+no means certain what the arrival of the automobile might portend. The
+four at the curb, deterred from retreat by that sense of shame which
+is not entirely absent even in the lowest and most depraved, were now
+insistently giving their rap to incite their comrades to hasten. The
+rotund gentleman walked around to that side of the carriage and gazed
+at them with some degree of interest and curiosity. "Rap, rap--rap;
+rap, rap--rap," went the sticks of the four and down the street came
+answering raps and soon the four were joined by two more.
+
+"Don't let him go now, we've almost got him. We'd had him, if Red
+hadn't gone to sleep and let him get by. Come on, come on."
+
+The six rushed at the carriage, whereat the rotund gentleman, with an
+agility not to be looked for in one of his contour and condition,
+received the foremost with smash, smash--smash, in each eye and on the
+nose, and the second likewise, when bidding the driver be off, he
+leaped into the carriage with his comrades. A single bullet whistled
+after them as they whirled away.
+
+"Rap, rap--rap. I rapped 'em," said the rotund gentleman. "I always
+did hate a knocker."
+
+With your permission I will here interpolate the remark that the
+further adventures of the eminent surgeon with the mysterious
+confederacy that sought his life, bore evidence that these depraved
+and ruffianly men were not without a certain rude artistic temperament
+as well as a tinge of romance, and a dramatic sense that many who
+write for the stage might well envy them.
+
+The elation of the doctor over his escape from the toils of the
+thieves was not of long duration. His breakfast was interrupted by a
+call to the telephone and over the wires came to his startled ears a
+hollow "knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." At his office door
+down town softly came "tap, tap--tap; tap, tap--tap," and snatch the
+door open as hastily as he might, he saw nothing, heard nothing, heard
+nothing but the electric bells on the floors above and floors below
+calling for the elevator: "buzz, buzz--buzz; buzz, buzz--buzz." He
+walked along State Street at the busy hour of noon and all about him
+in the throngs was the dull impact of canes upon the pavement, "thud,
+thud--thud; thud, thud--thud." As he rode home in the street car at
+nightfall, back of him in the train at street corner after corner he
+heard passengers jingle the bell for stopping, "ding, ding--ding;
+ding, ding--ding."
+
+Although Dr. McDill was a man of great native resolution and intrepid
+in the face of known and seen dangers, the horrors of the invisible
+forces of death everywhere surrounding him so wore at his soul that he
+returned down town and spent the night at a hotel. On the morrow, he
+severely condemned himself for this yielding to fear, for on the front
+steps of his house lay the dead form of his great watch dog, Jacques.
+There were evidences of a struggle in which the assailants had not
+been unscathed. Bits of cloth lay about and examining the stains of
+blood that plentifully blotched the walk, he discovered that some of
+it was human blood.
+
+"Ah," he said, in deep self-reproach, "if I had stayed here as I
+should, I would have been able to fight with poor Jacques and brought
+low some of my enemies. How easily I could have fired from the upper
+windows as Jacques made their presence known. It is evident that the
+noise of the struggle was so great that the fiends were afraid to
+continue the attack and ran away."
+
+Philosophers and poets have found a theme for dissertation in the fact
+that the dog leaves his own kindred to dwell with man and fights them
+in behalf of his master. It has ever seemed to me that this were but
+half of the tale, for full many a man loves his dog better than the
+rest of mankind, and so the devotion of the race of dogs finds return
+and recompense. Outside his own family, there was no living thing in
+the city of Chicago which had so dwelt in the affections of Dr. McDill
+as the dog Jacques. Of the truth of this, he had had but dim
+realization until now and he was like to burst with sorrow and with
+hatred of the vile beings who had marked him and his for slaughter.
+Lifting the stiff form of his humble comrade, for the first time did
+he observe a poniard thrust in the poor beast's throat. The blade
+impaled a piece of paper and upon it was written the word "Knock."
+
+"Knock!" cried the doctor: "but henceforth it shall be I that knock.
+Hasten the time when we may meet, malignant knaves. Never again shall
+I avoid you. Henceforth, I go about my business as before, for it is
+thus that I may expect the sooner to encounter you."
+
+An urgent matter would require the doctor's presence in the
+municipality of Evanston that night. He could not expect to return
+before twelve o'clock in the morning and of this informing the cook,
+who in the temporary reduction of the family carried on the household
+without the aid of a second girl, he departed northward. It was past
+the hour of one when he let himself in the front door of his
+residence. A pleasant savor of various viands saluted his nostrils and
+in the drawing-room he observed that the chairs and tables had all
+been thrust against the wall as if to clear the floor for dancing. In
+the dining-room, the evidence of recent festivity was complete, for
+the table was covered with the remnants of a sumptuous repast. No
+words were needed to tell him that Olga Blomgren, the cook, had taken
+advantage of the foreknowledge of his absence to entertain a wide
+circle of friends; but here indeed was a mystery. Why had she not set
+everything in order and removed all traces of the entertainment? He
+moved toward the kitchen in wonder and--his heart stood still. The
+beams of the lamp held above his head were shot back by the gleam of
+blue and white satin, his wife's favorite ball dress on the kitchen
+floor. But it was not his wife's fair hair and snowy shoulders that,
+rising out of the glistening blue and white, were striped with a
+glistening red, but the snowy shoulders and fair hair of poor Olga
+Blomgren. Thus had she paid for her hour of magnificence. Thus had
+death cut her down because the maid's form was of the same statuesque
+beauty as her mistress's. Tenderly the doctor stooped to lift up the
+dead girl, stricken in her mistress's stead. There was a poniard in
+her throat, and it impaled a piece of paper upon which was written
+"Knock."
+
+"Knock, knock--" the next knock would be upon his own heart.
+
+Whatever design the doctor had held of not appealing to the police for
+protection against his invisible foes, his affairs had now reached a
+point where the intervention of the officers of the law could no
+longer be avoided. Poor Jacques could be consigned to earth without
+the intervention of priest or police, but the murder of Olga was a
+matter for official investigation. With that crafty and subtle way the
+astute sleuths of the Chicago constabulary have of informing the
+public through the intermediary of the press of all measures projected
+against evil-doers, of moves to be made, of arrests to be attempted,
+all citizens were in possession of the fact that owing to the
+startling plot just brought to light, all gatherings and coteries of
+men, especially at late hours, were to be watched, investigated, and
+made to give accounts of themselves. Dr. McDill fumed at the turn
+affairs had taken. That the confederacy of thieves would abandon their
+attempts upon his life, was not to be dreamed of. But they would
+forego the pleasure of witnessing his death in the presence of all
+assembled together. They would now delegate the attack to a single
+individual, and in event of his death, he could hope to carry with him
+but one of his enemies.
+
+Again was Dr. McDill called to the hospital for a night operation.
+Leaving his driver without, he cautioned him.
+
+"August, I don't want you to be fooled the way you were before. If any
+man comes out of the hospital and says I send word for you to drive
+home without waiting for me, pay no attention to him. Take no orders
+from anybody but me."
+
+"All right. They can't fool me vonce again already."
+
+But when a cab drove up and let out a tall gentleman in a silk hat,
+who went into the hospital, and after a little the cab driver, a
+friendly and talkative person of Irish extraction, offered August a
+flask full of a beverage also of Irish extraction, August took a
+drink.
+
+"He told me not to take no orders yet already from nobody but him. But
+he didn't say nothin' about takin' a drink vonce."
+
+"Take a drink twice, then, Hans," said the person of Irish extraction,
+"already, yet, and by and by, too."
+
+It was all of four hours later that Dr. McDill stepped out of the
+hospital door. He paused under the light of the globe over the porch
+and examining a large bag of water-proof silk, he thrust therein a
+sponge upon which he poured the contents of a small phial, after
+which, seeing that a noose of string that closed the mouth of the bag
+was not entangled, he strode briskly toward his buggy. The side
+curtains were on and consequently the interior was in a dark shadow.
+Pausing a moment on the step, as if to arrange his overcoat, he made a
+quick, dexterous movement toward the person in the carriage and,
+throwing the bag over his head, pulled the noose. A terrific blow
+struck the doctor in the breast, but the arm that struck it fell
+powerless before it could be repeated and the striker lurched forward
+on the dashboard in the utter limpness of complete insensibility.
+
+"It is not August," said the doctor, straightening up the hooded
+figure and taking the reins. "How well was my precaution taken! I
+believe that was the last knock that any member of that band of
+diabolical assassins will ever strike."
+
+In the private laboratory of his own home, the doctor sat facing his
+captive, whom, after binding hand and foot, he had restored to his
+senses. The outlaw was the first to break the silence.
+
+"You've got me and you think you'll do me," said the outlaw, with a
+succession of oaths and vile epithets it would be needless as well as
+improper for me to repeat. "But if you harm me, my friends will more
+than pay you up for it, just as they have everybody that crossed
+them."
+
+"Your friends are of a mind to kill me, whatever befall. Sparing or
+killing you, will in nowise affect their purpose. Whatever may come
+to-morrow, to-night you must obey my commands."
+
+"I won't do a thing you tell me to. I don't have to, see? My friends
+will look for you just as soon as I don't turn up, and it will go hard
+with you."
+
+"Just as soon as you do not turn up with the news you have killed me.
+We'll see whether you will do what I tell you to."
+
+"You dassen't kill me. You're afraid to kill me. My friends would fix
+you and the law would get you, if they did not."
+
+"Your profession relies upon the forbearance and softheartedness of
+the public. You know that those you rob hesitate to shoot. No such
+hesitation hampers you. It is part of your stock in trade to keep the
+public terrorized. You kill all who disobey your orders, for if people
+began to resist you successfully you must needs go out of business.
+Did all put aside their repugnance to shed blood and kill your kind as
+they would wolves, we would have no more of you."
+
+"You dassen't kill me, you dassen't kill me," cried the robber. It was
+the snarl of the wild beast, hopelessly held in the toils.
+
+"It is true that I hesitate to kill. I am not proud of this
+hesitation, for the trend of the best medical and sociological thought
+is now toward the execution of all degenerates and criminals, that
+they may not contaminate the race with descendants. However, my office
+is to save life and I cannot do otherwise. But I am a surgeon, and
+every day I do things in the effort to save and prolong life that to a
+layman are repulsive and awful, more revolting to him than the sight
+of bloodless death itself. From the taking of human life I draw back.
+But no repugnance, no horror, unsteadies my hand elsewhere. The end of
+the crimes of your devilish confederacy has come. The law has not
+restrained you, could not. Your own unparalleled wickedness has
+delivered you into my hands. Many a man have you brought low, many a
+family have you desolated. Widows and orphans cry out against you, and
+not in vain. I shall so knock your gang that never again shall one of
+you harm even the weakest. You shall all live, but it shall be your
+prayer, if you black hearts can utter prayer, that you be dead."
+
+The outlaw's tongue moved thickly in a mouth that dried suddenly at
+these solemn words of the doctor. "You can't do it, you can't do it,
+you can't do it, you duffer----" and his voice rumbled on in a long
+string of imprecations.
+
+The doctor seized him and carrying him to the cellar, lay him against
+the coal bin. Then the captive heard him in a room above engaged upon
+some sort of carpentry, and whether it was the captive's imagination,
+or design of the doctor, or whether unconsciously the doctor's mind
+had become possessed, the sounds of the hammer as it drove nails and
+struck pieces of wood into place echoed in the cellar; "knock,
+knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." Soon the stairs groaned under the
+weight of the doctor carrying some great contrivance, and the outlaw
+found himself lying stretched out upon some sort of operating chair,
+his ankles held in a pair of stocks below, his outstretched arms held
+by the wrists in a pair of stocks above. All was black in the cellar,
+all but where a single blood red bar of light from the open door of
+the furnace fell upon the doctor turning at the winch of the bed of
+torture upon which lay the robber.
+
+Hardly ten turns did he make, for at the first little twinges of pain,
+premonishing the agonies to come, the caitiff chattered in terror
+promises to do all the doctor should order, and so was released.
+Cringing and fawning, the outlaw heard what he was required to do. He
+was to write a letter. In this, he was to tell of the method of his
+capture. He was to say he was confined in a second-story room, feet
+and hands shackled, and that he was also chained to a staple in the
+floor. (That this all might be true, the doctor took him to a
+second-story room and so fettered him.) He found himself able to use
+his hands to write, and, happily, discovered writing material and
+stamps upon a table. He would write a letter and throw it on the porch
+below, where perhaps the postman would find it and send it to its
+destination. He asked help. His friends must come that night. The
+doctor would be on guard, and who could say he would not call in
+others? The doors and windows were all well secured, all but a cellar
+window on the east side. (Of this, the doctor informed him, that he,
+the doctor, might not be guilty of instigating the writing of anything
+that was false in any particular.) They must enter by this window. The
+door leading above stairs from the cellar could be easily forced and
+the noise thus occasioned could not be heard outside of the house.
+They must come at two in the morning. Come before another dawn, as the
+doctor was going to hold him one day before turning him over to the
+police, hoping the gang would do something to involve themselves in
+some way they would not if the police were after them with a hue and
+cry.
+
+The outlaw wrote the letter as ordered, addressed it to Barry O'Toole,
+and threw it out of the window. It fell beyond the porch, on the
+ground. But this the doctor remedied by hiring a small boy for ten
+cents to pick it up and put it in a mail box. After which, the doctor
+betook himself to the nearest extensive hardware establishment.
+
+At two o'clock the next morning, the beams of a dark lantern shone
+athwart the darkness of the cellar of Dr. McDill's residence.
+
+"It's all right, boys. I can smell escaping gas, but it's all right.
+There's nobody in there. Now for the doctor. We'll kill him and all
+who are in there with him, and burn the house," said a voice behind
+the lantern, and one after another, eleven burly men dropped into the
+cellar through the narrow east window high in the wall. As the feet of
+the last man struck the ground, there was a sound as of a rope jerked
+by some one in the orifice by which they had just entered, and they
+heard two succeeding crashes within the cellar, followed by the slam
+of an iron shutter over the window. There was a sound of a spasmodic
+rush upon the cellar stairs and a beating upon the door, and then a
+succession of softer sounds, as of men rolling down stairs, and then
+silence.
+
+A match was struck upon the outside of the iron shutter. It revealed
+the face of Dr. McDill, lighting a cigar.
+
+"The gas alone would have been almost sufficient. But when all those
+bottles of ether and chloroform broke---- I had better open the window
+so it will work off and I can get them out. I will write to my wife to
+stay away two months longer. Olga is dead and Kate is gone. I'll
+discharge August to-morrow, as he deserves. The field is clear."
+
+One morning, as Hans Olson, cook of the King Olaf Magnus, staunch
+schooner engaged in the shingle trade between Chicago and the city of
+Manistee, state of Michigan, on this particular morning lying in the
+Chicago River--on this morning, as Mr. Olson was pouring overboard
+some dishwater, preparing the breakfast for the yet sleeping crew, he
+was horrified to see floating in the current that would eventually
+carry them past the great city of St. Louis, twelve naked human arms.
+Despite his horror and alarm at this grewsome array of severed
+members, he noted that so far as he could observe, they were all left
+arms, forearms, disjointed at the elbows. Subsequent examination but
+added to the mystery. It was no trick of medical students intended to
+set the town agog. They were not dissecting subjects, but limbs lately
+taken from living bodies, and they were detached with the highest
+skill known to the art of chirurgery. The town talked and it was a
+day's wonder, but the solving of the mystery proving impossible, it
+was passing into tradition when all were horrified anew to hear that
+Johannes Klubertanz, a member of the great and honest German-American
+element, while walking through Lincoln Park early one morning,
+stumbled over some objects which, upon examination, proved to be
+twelve human forearms, _right forearms_!
+
+Again were the wisest baffled in even guessing at this riddle, as they
+were a third time, when one Prosper B. Shaw came with the story that
+while rowing down in the drainage canal, he had come upon, floating
+gently along, dissevered at the knee joint, _twelve human legs_!
+
+The whole community shuddered at the dark secret hidden in their
+midst, but at last came the answer, yet not the answer. Of all strange
+crews that mortal sight has gazed upon, that was the strangest, that
+dozen men who out of nowhere appeared suddenly in the streets one
+morning, armless all, all with wooden left legs. Their story you would
+ask in vain, for just the little chord by which the tongue forms
+intelligible words was gone. Their babblings came just to the border
+of articulate speech, but not beyond. Torrents of half-formed words
+they poured forth, but only half-formed, and to their mouthed jabber
+the crowd listened without understanding. Did you thrust a pencil in
+their jaws and bid them write their tale? Gone was some little muscle
+that grips the jaws and the pencils lolled between teeth that could
+not nip them. And as for their lips, oh, their mouths, their mouths!
+Such an example of the chirurgery that has to do with the altering of
+the human face had never before been witnessed, for nature had never
+made those faces. One such countenance she might have made in cruel
+sport, but never twelve, and twelve altogether, as like as peas in a
+pod, twelve human jack o'lanterns, twelve travesties upon humanity's
+front. Howsoever they might once have looked, not even their own
+mothers could know them now. Around each eye the same wrinkles led
+away. On each face was a bulbous nose. But the mouths, oh, the mouths!
+Each was drawn back over the teeth in a perpetual grin, each was
+upturned at corners which ended well nigh in the middle of the cheek.
+Here were the victims of the horrors that had made the city shudder,
+but dumb and unrecognizable. In all the thousands that looked at them,
+not one could say he had ever seen them before. In all these
+thousands, there was not one to whom they could speak. There were
+their stiff faces, frozen into that terrible perpetual grin, so many
+idols of wood, save for their eyes, and they were the only things that
+lived in their dead faces.
+
+Such rudimentary human beings it would be hard to conceive, and so
+after a while it occurred to some one that the same scientific methods
+that discover and disclose to us the modes of life, the habits, and
+even thoughts of primitive and rudimentary man, might be devoted to
+establishing a means of communication with them and unveil the secret
+the whole world was eager to know. Accordingly, they were taken to the
+University of Chicago and turned over to the department of
+anthropology. The learned expounders of this science were not long in
+devising a simple means of communication. The twelve unfortunates were
+seated upon a recitation bench and a doctor of philosophy wrote out an
+alphabet upon the blackboard.
+
+"One rap of your foot will be A," said the doctor of philosophy. "Two
+will be B. Two raps, a pause, and one will be C. We will soon learn
+your story."
+
+At this moment, the reverberations of a prodigious blow upon the door
+outside echoed through the room, "bang, bang--bang, bang, bang--bang."
+
+Unaccountably startled, as if at the hearing of some portent, the
+professor stood rooted to the spot for a moment, and then was about to
+leap to the door, when the simulacrums before him sprang to their feet
+and with a tremendous stamping, smote their wooden legs upon the
+floor, "stamp, stamp--stamp, stamp, stamp--stamp."
+
+The professor stared at the twelve mutes. There were their immobile
+faces, as wooden as their wooden legs, wearing their perpetual grin,
+but the westering sun shone on their eyes and there he saw an abject,
+grovelling fear, dreadful to behold, the master passion of twelve
+souls, slaves to some mysterious will which had just made itself
+manifest out of the unseen. By what means the will had gained this
+ascendancy, the terrible disfigurements of their remnants of bodies
+told only too well, and he who ran could read the utter prostration
+before the power which in their lives had been the greatest and most
+terrible in the universe. Again, far off in a distant corridor of the
+building, slowly rumbled to them: "knock, knock--knock; knock,
+knock--knock," and the twelve unfortunates, like so many automatons,
+gave token of their obedience. They had been warned to keep the
+secret.
+
+And so was foiled the attempts of the learned anthropologists to hold
+converse with these rudimentary beings. The alphabet of such elaborate
+devisings went for naught. Never did the twelve persons in the state
+of primitive culture get further than the letter C: "knock,
+knock--knock; knock, knock--knock."
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+"I am at a loss to understand," said Mr. Middleton, "why you have
+entitled the narration you have just related, 'The Pleasant Adventures
+of Dr. McDill.' For to my mind, they seemed anything but pleasant
+adventures."
+
+"How so?" asked the emir. "Is it not pleasant to thwart the
+machinations and defeat the evil intentions of the villains such as
+composed the confederacy that sought the doctor's life? Does there not
+reside in mankind a sense of justice which rejoices at seeing meted
+out to wrong-doers the deserts of their crimes?"
+
+To which Mr. Middleton replying with a nod of thoughtful assent, after
+a proper period of rumination upon the words of the emir, that
+accomplished ruler continued:
+
+"Despite the boasted protection of the law, how often is a man
+compelled to rely for his protection upon his own prowess, skill or
+address. There are many occasions when right under the nose of the
+police, one saves himself by the resort to physical strength, weapons,
+or the use of a cajoling tongue. Theoretically, Dr. McDill was amply
+protected by the mantle of the law. In reality, it was man to man as
+much as if he had met his foes in the Arabian desert, with none but
+himself and them and the vultures. Do you go armed?"
+
+"No," replied Mr. Middleton, with a flippant smile; "but I can go
+pretty fast, and that has heretofore done as well as going armed."
+
+"Young man," said the emir, sternly, "a bullet can outstrip your
+fleetest footsteps. There may never be but one occasion when you will
+need a weapon, but on that occasion the possession of the means of
+protection may spell the difference between life and life."
+
+Hardly had he uttered them, before Mr. Middleton regretted his forward
+and pert words, for never before had he answered the emir lightly,
+such was his respect for him as a man of goodly parts and as one set
+in authority, and such was his gratitude toward him as a benefactor.
+Stammering forth what was at once an apology and an acknowledgement of
+the wisdom of what the emir had said, Mr. Middleton began to make
+preparations to go. But Prince Achmed bade him wait, and saying a few
+words to Mesrour in the Arabic language, the blackamore brought to him
+a pair of pistols of a formidable aspect. In sooth, one could hardly
+tell whether they ought to be called pistols, or culverins. In the
+shape of the stocks alone could anyone detect that they were pistols.
+The bore of each was more than an inch in diameter, and the octagonal
+barrels of thick steel, heavily inlaid with silver, were a foot and a
+half long. The handles, which were in proportion to the barrels and so
+long that four hands could grasp them, were so completely covered with
+an inlay of pearl that no wood was visible. Taking one of them, the
+emir rammed home a great load of powder, upon which he placed a
+handful of balls as large as marbles. Having served the second
+likewise, he handed the pair to Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Take them. Protected by them, you need have little fear. But woe
+betide the man who stands in front of them, for so wide is the
+distribution of their charge, that he must be a most indifferent
+marksman who could not do execution with them."
+
+Thanking the emir for the gift and the entertainment and instruction
+of his discourse, Mr. Middleton departed. Impressed though he had been
+by Prince Achmed's counsel and by the lesson to be derived from the
+recital of the experiences of Dr. McDill, Mr. Middleton did not carry
+the pistols as he went about his daily vocation. It was impossible to
+so bestow them about his garments that they did not cause large and
+unsightly protuberances and to carry them openly was not to be thought
+of. Their weight, too, was so great that it was burdensome to carry
+them in any manner. Coming into his room unexpectedly in the middle of
+the forenoon of the Thursday following the acquisition of the weapons,
+he surprised Hilda Svenson, maid of all work, in the act of examining
+one of them, which she had extracted from the place where they lay
+concealed in the lower bureau drawer beneath a pile of underclothing.
+With a start of guilty surprise, Hilda let the pistol fall to the
+floor. Fortunately it did not go off, but nonetheless was he convinced
+that he ought to dispose of the two weapons, for any day Hilda might
+shoot herself with one, while on the weekly sheet changing day, Mrs.
+Leschinger, the landlady, might shoot herself with the other. There
+was no place in the room where he could conceal them from the
+painstaking investigations of Hilda and Mrs. Leschinger, and the
+expedient of extracting the charges not occurring to him, he felt that
+it was clearly his duty to remove the lives of the two women from
+jeopardy by disposing of the pistols. He was in truth pained at the
+necessity of parting with the gifts which the emir had made with such
+solicitude for his welfare and as some assuagement to this regret he
+sought to dispose of them as profitably as possible. With this end in
+view, he made an appointment for a private audience after hours with
+Mr. Sidney Kuppenheimer, who conducted a large loan bank on Madison
+Street and was reputed a connoisseur and admirer of all kinds of
+curios.
+
+On the evening for which he had made the appointment, he set forth,
+intending to make an early and short call upon his friend Chauncy
+Stackelberg and wife, before repairing to Mr. Kuppenheimer's place of
+business. But such was the engaging quality of the conversation of the
+newly married couple, abounding both in humor and good sense, and so
+interested was he in hearing of the haps and mishaps of married life,
+a state he hoped to enter as soon as fortune and the young lady of
+Englewood should be propitious, that he was unaware of the flight of
+time until in the midst of a pause in the conversation, he heard the
+cathedral clock Mrs. Stackelberg's uncle had given her as a wedding
+present, solemnly tolling the hour of eleven. The hour Mr.
+Kuppenheimer had named was one hour agone. To have kept the
+appointment, he should have started two hours before.
+
+Another half hour had flown before Mr. Middleton, having paused to
+partake of some chow-chow recently made by Mrs. Stackelberg and highly
+recommended by her liege, finally left the house, carrying a pistol in
+either hand. The night was somewhat cloudy, but although there was
+neither moon nor stars, it was much lighter than on some nights when
+all the minor luminaries are ablaze, or the moon itself is aloft,
+shining in its first or last quarter, a phenomenon remarked upon by an
+able Italian scientist in the middle of the last century and by him
+attributed to some luminous quality that inheres in the clouds
+themselves. Mr. Middleton was walking along engrossed in thoughts of
+the scene of domestic bliss he had lately quitted and in dreams of the
+even more delightful home he hoped to some day enjoy with the young
+lady of Englewood, when he suddenly became cognizant of four
+individuals a short distance away, comporting themselves in an unusual
+and peculiar manner. Cautiously approaching them as quietly as
+possible, he perceived that it was two robbers despoiling two citizens
+of their valuables, one pair standing in the middle of the street, one
+on the sidewalk, the citizens with their hands elevated above their
+heads in a strained and uncomfortable attitude, while each
+robber--with back to him--was pointing a revolver with one hand and
+turning pockets inside out with the other.
+
+With a resolution and celerity that astonished him, as he afterwards
+dwelt upon it in retrospect, Mr. Middleton rushed silently upon the
+nearest robber, him in the street, and dealt him a terrible blow upon
+the head with the barrel of a pistol. Without a sound, the robber sank
+to the earth, whereupon the citizen, whether he had lost his head
+through fear, or thought Mr. Middleton a new and more dangerous
+outlaw, fled away like the wind. Snatching the bag of valuables in the
+unconscious thief's hands, Mr. Middleton made toward the other robber,
+who, to his astonishment, hissed without looking around:
+
+"What did you let your man get away for, you fool? Try and make
+yourself useful somehow. Hold this swag and cover the man, so I can
+have both hands and get through quick."
+
+Taking the valuables the robber handed him, Mr. Middleton with
+calmness and deliberation placed them in his pockets, after which he
+placed a muzzle of a pistol in the back of the robber's neck and
+sharply commanded:
+
+"Hands up!"
+
+Up went the robber's hands as if he were a jumping-jack jerked by a
+string, whereupon his late victim, doubtless animated by the same
+emotions as those of the other citizens, fled away like the wind, but
+not in silence, for at every jump he bellowed, "Thieves, murder,
+help!"
+
+A window slammed up in the house before which they were standing and
+the glare of an electric bicycle lamp played full upon Mr. Middleton
+and his prisoner.
+
+"I've got him," said Mr. Middleton, proudly.
+
+"Got him! Got him!" gasped an astonished voice. "Well, of all
+effrontery! Got him, you miserable thief? The police are coming and
+they'll get you, and I can identify you, if they don't succeed in
+nabbing you red-handed."
+
+Shocked and almost paralyzed, Mr. Middleton turned to expostulate with
+the misled householder, when the robber, seizing the opportunity, fled
+away like the wind, bellowing at every jump, "Thieves, murder, help!"
+and as if aroused by the sound of his compatriot's voice, the thief
+who had been lying unconscious in the street all this while, arose and
+hastened away, somewhat unsteadily, it is true, yet at a considerable
+degree of speed.
+
+It did not require any extended reflective processes for Mr. Middleton
+to tell himself that if he waited for the police, he would be in a
+very bad plight, for he had the stolen property upon his person, the
+thieves had gone, and even if the victims were able to say he was not
+one of the two original thieves--which their disturbed state of mind
+made most uncertain--they would be likely to declare him a thief
+notwithstanding, a charge which the stolen property on his person
+would bear out. The police could now be heard down the street and the
+householder was making the welkin ring with vociferous shouts. With a
+sudden access of rage at this individual whose well-intended efforts
+had thwarted justice and might yet fasten crime upon innocence, Mr.
+Middleton pointed a pistol at the upper pane of the window where shone
+the bicycle lamp. There was a roar that shook the air, followed by a
+crash of glass and the clatter of a dozen bullets upon the brick wall
+of the house, and a shriek of terror from the householder and the
+bicycle lamp instantly vanished. With a heart strangely at peace in
+the midst of the dangers that encompassed him, Mr. Middleton sped up
+the street, dashed through an alleyway, back for a block on the next
+street in the direction he had just come, and thenceforth leisurely
+and with an appearance of virtue he did not need to feign, made his
+way home without molestation.
+
+Upon examining the booty that had so strangely come into his
+possession, Mr. Middleton was at a loss to think which were the
+greater villains, those who had robbed, or those who had been robbed.
+One wallet contained five hundred and forty dollars in greenbacks and
+some memoranda accompanying it showed that it was a corruption fund to
+be used in bribing voters at an approaching election. The other wallet
+contained sixty dollars and a detailed plan for bribery, fraud, and
+intimidation which was to be carried out in one of the doubtful wards.
+There were also some silver coins, and two gold watches bearing no
+names or marks that could identify their owners, but the detailed plan
+contained the name of the politician who had drawn it up and who was
+to be benefited by its successful accomplishment. This was a clue by
+following which Mr. Middleton might have found the parties who had
+been robbed and return their property, but he was deterred from doing
+so by several considerations. The knowledge he had of the proposed
+fraud was exceedingly dangerous to the interests of one of the
+political parties and to the personal interests of one of the bosses
+of that party. It would be clearly to their advantage to have Mr.
+Middleton jailed and so put where there would be no danger that he
+would divulge the information in his possession. Besides this, the
+money was to be used for corrupt purposes, would go into the hands of
+evil men who would spend it evilly. Deprived of it, a thoroughly bad
+man was less likely to be elected. For these moral and prudential
+reasons, Mr. Middleton saw that it was plainly his duty to the public
+and to himself to retain the money. The victims, bearing in mind that
+the recovery of the money by the police would also mean the discovery
+of the incriminating documents and that any persecution of the robbers
+might incite them to sell the documents to the opposite party, would
+be very chary about doing or saying anything. But there was the
+householder, who surely would tell his tale and who had an idea of Mr.
+Middleton's personal appearance. Accordingly, that excellent young man
+disposed of the gold watches to one Isaac Fiscovitz on lower State
+Street, and with the results of the exchange purchased an entirely new
+suit, new hat, and new shoes. The incriminating documents, he placed
+under the carpet in his room against a time when he might see an
+opportunity to safely dispose of them to the pecuniary advantage of
+himself and to the discomfiture of the contemptible creature whose
+handiwork they were.
+
+He said nothing of these transactions when on the appointed evening he
+once more sat in the presence of the urbane prince of the tribe of
+Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet,
+Achmed began the narration of The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson.
+
+
+
+
+_The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson._
+
+
+Miss Clarissa Dawson was a young lady who had charge of the cutlery
+counter in one of the great emporiums of State Street. She was
+reckoned of a pretty wit and not more cutting were the Sheffield
+razors that were piled before her than the remarks she sometimes made
+to those who, incited thereto by her reputation for readiness of
+retort, sought to engage her in a contest of repartee. It was seldom
+that she issued from these encounters other than triumphant, leaving
+her presumptuous opponents defeated and chagrined. But in the month of
+November of the last year, for once she owned to herself that she had
+been overcome,--overcome, it is true, because her adversary was
+plainly a person of stupidity, mailed by his doltishness against the
+keenest sarcasm she could launch against him, yet nevertheless
+overcome. To her choicest bit of irony, the individual replied,
+"Somebody left you on the grindstone and forgot to take you off," to
+which the most adroit in quips and quirks could find no fitting
+replication, unless it were to indulge in facial contortion or
+invective, and Miss Clarissa was too much of a lady to do either.
+Forced into silence, she had no resource but to seek to transfix him
+with a protracted and contemptuous stare, which, though failing to
+disconcert the object, put her in possession of the facts that he had
+mild blue eyes, that the remnants of his hair were red, that he was
+slightly above middle height and below middle age, and that there was
+little about his face and still less his figure to distinguish him
+from a multitude of men of the average type. Indeed, one could not
+even conjecture his nationality, for his type was one to be seen in
+all branches of the Indo-European race. If from a package in his upper
+left-hand coat pocket, which, broken, disclosed some wieners, you
+concluded he was of the German nation, a short dudeen in an upper vest
+pocket would seem to indicate that he was an Irishman. His coat was of
+black cheviot, new, and of the current cut. His vest was of corduroy,
+of the kind in vogue in the past decade, while his pantaloons, black,
+with a faint green line in them, were a compromise, being of a
+non-commital cut that would never be badly out of style in any modern
+period.
+
+Sustaining Miss Clarissa's stare with great composure, he purchased
+six German razors at thirty-five cents each, six English at fifty,
+twelve American at the same price, and a stray French razor at
+sixty-two.
+
+"Don't you want some razorine?" asked Miss Clarissa. "It makes
+razors--and other things--sharper."
+
+"Why don't you use it, then, instead of lobsterine?" replied the
+stranger, picking up his package and the change. Miss Clarissa
+deigning to give no reply but an angry frown, the stranger expressed
+his gratitude for the amusement he intimated she had afforded him and
+he further said he hoped he would see her at the Charity Ball and he
+made bold to ask her to save the second two-step for him, and
+thereafter departed, having declined Miss Clarissa's offer to have his
+purchases sent to his address, an offer dictated not by a spirit of
+accommodation and kindliness, but by a desire to learn in what part of
+the city he had his residence.
+
+On the morrow again came a man to purchase razors, of which there was
+a large number on Miss Clarissa's counter, traveling men's samples for
+sale at ridiculous prices. The man had purchased two dozen razors
+before Miss Clarissa, noting this similarity to the transactions of
+the odious person and thereby led to take a good look at him, observed
+with astonishment that this new man had on exactly the same suit that
+had been worn by the purchaser of the day before. She recognized the
+fabric, the color, everything down to a discoloration on the left coat
+lapel. Here the resemblance ended. The second individual was a young
+man. He had a heavy shock of abundant hair. He was not more than
+twenty-eight years old and so far from being commonplace, he was of a
+distinguished appearance. But as the eyes of Miss Clarissa continued
+to dwell upon him in some admiration, she told herself that the
+resemblance did not end with the clothes, after all. His eyes were of
+the same blue, his hair of the same auburn as those of the man of
+yesterday. Indeed, the man of yesterday might have been this man with
+twenty years added on him, with the light of hope and ambition dimmed
+by contact with the world, and his youthful alertness and dash
+succeeded by the resigned vacuity of one who has seen none of his
+early dreams realized. Again did Miss Clarissa ask if he would have
+his purchases sent to his address, but this time it was not entirely
+curiosity and the perfunctory performance of a duty, for she would
+gladly have been of service to one of such a pleasing presence.
+Communing with himself for a moment, the young man said:
+
+"On the whole, you may. But they must be delivered to me in person,
+into my own hands. I would take them, but I have a number of other
+things to take. Remember, they are to be delivered to me in person,"
+and he handed her a card which announced that his name was Asbury
+Fuller and on which was written in lead pencil the address of a house
+in a quarter of the city which, once the most fashionable of all, had
+suffered from the encroachments of trade and where a few mansions yet
+occupied by the aristocracy were surrounded by the deserted homes of
+families which had fled to the newer haunts of fashion, leaving their
+former abodes to be occupied by boarding mistresses, dentists,
+doctors, clairvoyants, and a whole host of folk whose names would
+never be in the papers until their burial permits were issued.
+
+Miss Clarissa did a very peculiar thing. It was already four o'clock
+of a Saturday afternoon. Instead of immediately giving the package
+into the hands of the delivery department, she retained it and, at
+closing time, going to the room where ready made uniforms for
+messenger boys were kept, she purloined one. Now it must be known that
+the principal reason for doing a thing so unusual, not to say
+indiscreet, was her desire to obey the young man's injunction to hand
+the razors into his own hands and no others. She had become possessed
+of the idea that some disaster would befall if the razors came into
+the possession of any one else. Moreover, the stranger had humbled her
+in the contest of repartee, which, as a true woman, had made her
+entertain an admiration for him, and this and his strange disguises
+and his unaccountable purchases had surrounded him with a mist of
+romantic mystery she fain would penetrate. Some little time before, it
+had been Miss Clarissa's misfortune, through sickness, to lose much of
+her hair. It had now begun to grow again and resume its former
+luxuriant abundance, but by removing several switches--of her own
+hair--and the bolster commonly called a rat, and sleeking her hair
+down hard with oil, she appeared as a boy might who was badly in need
+of a haircut. After a light supper, she set out alone for the
+residence of Asbury Fuller and at the end of her journey found herself
+at the gateway of a somber edifice, which was apparently the only one
+in the block that was inhabited. On either side and across the way
+were vacant houses, lonesome and forbidding. Indeed, the residence of
+Asbury Fuller was itself scarcely less lonesome and forbidding. The
+grass of the plot before it was long and unkempt and heavily covered
+with mats of autumn leaves. The bricks of the front walk were sunken
+and uneven and the steps leading to the high piazza were deeply
+warped, as by pools of water that had lain and dried on their unswept
+surface through many seasons. The blinds hung awry and the paint on
+the great front doors was scaling, and altogether it was a faded
+magnificence, this of Asbury Fuller. She pulled the handle of the
+front-door bell and in response to its jangling announcement came a
+maid.
+
+"Asbury Fuller?" said the maid, omitting the "Mr." Miss Clarissa had
+affixed. "Go to the side door around to the right."
+
+Wondering if this were a lodging house and Asbury Fuller had a private
+entrance, or if it being his own house he had left word that callers
+should be sent to the side door to prevent the delivery of the razors
+being seen by others, Clarissa followed the walk through an avenue of
+dead syringa bushes and came to the side door. The same maid who had
+met her before, ushered her in and presently she found herself in a
+small apartment, almost a closet, standing at the back of Asbury
+Fuller. But though small, she remarked that the apartment was one of
+some magnificence, for on all sides was a quantity of burnished
+copper, binding the edges of a row of shelves and covering the whole
+top of a broad counter-like projection running along one side of the
+wall. Before this, Asbury Fuller was standing, assorting a number of
+cut-glass goblets of various sizes and putting them upon silver
+salvers, bottles of various colored wines being placed upon each
+salver with the goblets. He turned at her entrance and the look of sad
+and gloomy abstraction sitting upon his countenance instantly changed
+to one of relief and joy.
+
+"At last, at last," he exclaimed, in a deep tone which even more than
+his countenance betrayed his relief and joy. "It is almost too late
+and I thought the young woman had not attended to sending them, that
+she had failed me."
+
+"She would not fail you, sir," said Clarissa, earnestly, allowing
+herself in the protection her assumed character gave her the pleasure
+of giving utterance to her feeling of regard for the young man. "She
+would not fail, sir, she could not fail you. Oh, you wrong her, if you
+think she could ever break her word to you."
+
+Asbury Fuller bent an inscrutable look upon Clarissa and then bidding
+her remain until his return, hastily left the room. But though he was
+gone, Clarissa sat gloating upon the mental picture of his manly
+beauty. He seemed taller than before, for the stoop he had worn in the
+afternoon had now departed and he stood erect and muscular in the suit
+of full evening dress that set off his lithe, soldierly form to such
+advantage. His garb was of an elegance such as Clarissa had never
+before beheld, and it was plain that the aristocracy affected certain
+adornments in the privacy of their homes which they did not caparison
+themselves with in public. Clarissa had seen dress suits in
+restaurants and in theaters, but never before had she seen a
+bottle-green dress coat with gold buttons and a velvet collar and a
+vest with broad longitudinal stripes of white and brown. In a brief
+space, Asbury Fuller returned, and glancing at his watch, he said:
+
+"There is some time before the dinner party begins and I would like to
+talk with you. I am impressed by your apparent honesty and
+particularly by the air of devotion to duty that characterizes you.
+The latter I have more often remarked in women than in the more
+selfish sex to which we belong. We need a boy here. Wages, twenty
+dollars a month and keep."
+
+"Oh, sir, I should be pleased to come."
+
+"Your duties will commence at once. Owing to the fact that this old
+house has been empty for some time and the work of rehabilitating and
+refurnishing it is far from completed, you cannot at present have a
+room to yourself. You will sleep with John Klussmann, the hostler----"
+
+"Oh, sir, I cannot do that," exclaimed Clarissa, starting up in alarm.
+
+"John is a good boy and kicks very little in his sleep. But doubtless
+you object to the smell of horses."
+
+"Oh, sir, let me do what is needed this evening and go home and I will
+come back and work to-morrow and go home to-morrow night, and if by
+that time you find I can have a room by myself, perhaps I will come
+permanently."
+
+"I don't smell of horses myself," said Asbury Fuller, musingly, to
+which Clarissa making no response other than turning away her head to
+hide her blushes, he continued. "But two days will be enough. Indeed,
+to-night is the crucial point. I will not beat about the bush longer.
+I wish to attach you to my interests. I wish you to serve me to-night
+in the crisis of my career."
+
+"Oh, sir," said Clarissa, in the protection that her assumed character
+gave her, allowing herself the privilege of speaking her real
+sentiments, "I am attached to your interests. Let me serve you.
+Command, and I will use my utmost endeavor to obey."
+
+Asbury Fuller looked at her in surprise. Carried away by her feelings
+and in the state of mental exaltation which the romance and mystery of
+the adventure had induced, she had made a half movement to kneel as
+she thus almost swore her fealty in solemn tones.
+
+"Why are you attached to my interests?" asked Asbury Fuller, somewhat
+dryly.
+
+Alas, Clarissa could not take advantage of the protection her assumed
+character gave her to tell the real reason. Only as a woman could she
+do that, only as a woman could she say and be believed, "Because I
+love you."
+
+"Why, some people are naturally leaders, naturally draw others to
+them----"
+
+"You cannot be a spy upon me, since no one knows who I am."
+
+"A spy!" cried Clarissa, in a voice whose sorrowful reproach gave
+convincing evidence of her ingenuousness.
+
+"I wrong you, I wrong you," said Asbury Fuller. "I will trust you. I
+will tell you what you are to do----"
+
+"Butler," said a maid, poking her head in at the door, "it is time to
+come and give the finishing touches to the table. It is almost time
+for the dinner to be served," and without ado, Asbury Fuller sprang
+out of the room.
+
+A butler! A butler! Clarissa sat stunned. It was thus that her hero
+had turned out. Could she tell the other girls in the store with any
+degree of pride that she was keeping company with a butler? She had
+received a good literary education in the high school at Muncie,
+Indiana, and was a young woman of taste and refinement. Could she
+marry a butler? To be near her hero, she herself had just now been
+willing to undertake a menial position. But she had then imagined him
+to be a person of importance. This stage in her cogitations led her to
+the reflection that her feelings were unworthy of her. Had her regard
+for Asbury Fuller been all due to the belief that he was a person of
+importance, merely the worship of position, the selfish desire and
+hope--however faint--of rising to affluence and social dignity through
+him? Butler or no butler, Asbury Fuller was handsome, he was
+distinguished, his manner of speech was superior to that of any person
+she had ever known. Butler or no butler, she loved him. Just now she
+had hoped that he, rich and well placed, would overlook her poverty,
+and take her, friendless and obscure, for his bride. Could she give
+less than she had hoped he would give? And then as butler, her chances
+of winning him were so greatly increased.
+
+In a short time, he returned. He told her she was to wait on the table
+and instructed her how to serve the courses.
+
+"The master will look surprised when he sees you instead of me. If he
+asks who you are, say the new page. But he will be too much afraid of
+exciting the wonder of his guests to ask you any questions. I feel
+certain that he will accept your presence without question, being
+desirous his guests shall not think him a tyro in the management of an
+establishment like this. I feel certain that after dinner, his guests
+will ask to see his collection of arms. Indeed, Miss Bording told him
+in my hearing last Monday that she accepted his invitation here on
+condition that she be allowed to see the famous collection. You are to
+follow them into the drawing-room after dinner. The master will not
+know whether that is usual or not. If they do start to go to look at
+the arms, you are to say, 'The collection of your former weapons, sir,
+has been placed in the first room to the left at the head of the
+stairs. The paper-hangers and decorators have been busy.' Then you are
+to lead the way into that room, which you will find dimly lighted.
+After that, I will attend to everything myself."
+
+Although Clarissa could not but wonder at the strangeness of her
+instructions and to be somewhat alarmed at the evidences of a plot in
+which she was to be an agent, she agreed, for though her regard for
+Asbury Fuller would have been sufficient to cause such acquiescence,
+so great was her curiosity to have solved the mysteries which
+surrounded that individual, that this alone would have gained her
+consent.
+
+There were but two guests at the table of Mr. William Leadbury--Judge
+Volney Bording, and his daughter, Eulalia Bording. Mr. Leadbury cast a
+look of surprise and displeasure as he saw Clarissa serving the first
+course, but he quickly concealed these emotions and proceeded to
+plunge into an animated conversation with his guests. Indeed, it
+assumed the character of a monologue in which he frequently adverted
+to the weather, to be off on a tangent the next moment on a discussion
+of finance, politics, sociology, on which subjects, however, he was
+far from showing the positiveness and fixed opinion that he did while
+descanting upon the weather. In all the subjects he touched upon, he
+exhibited a certain skill in so framing his remarks that they would
+not run counter to any prejudices or opposite opinions of his
+auditors, but the feelings of the auditors having been elicited,
+served as a preamble from which he could go on, warmly agreeing with
+their views in the further and more complete unfolding of his own. He
+was between twenty-seven and thirty years of age, of a somewhat spare
+figure, and in the well-proportioned features of his face there was no
+one that would attract attention beyond the others and easily remain
+fixed in memory. He was not without an appearance of intelligence and
+his chest was thrown out and the small of his back drawn in after the
+manner of the Prussian ex-sergeants who give instruction in athletics
+and the cultivation of a proper carriage to the elite of this city,
+and withal he had the appearance of a person of substance and of
+consequence in his community. In the midst of a pause where he was
+occupied in putting his soup-spoon into his mouth, Miss Bording
+remarked:
+
+"Please do not talk about commonplace American subjects, Mr. Leadbury.
+Tell us of your foreign life. Tell us of Algeria. What sort of a
+country is Algeria?"
+
+Turning his eyes toward the chandelier about him and with an elegance
+of enunciation that did much to relieve the undeniably monotonous
+evenness of his discourse, he began:
+
+"Algeria, the largest and most important of the French colonial
+possessions, is a country of northern Africa, bounded on the north by
+the Mediterranean, west by Morocco, south by the desert of Sahara, and
+east by Tunis. It extends for about five hundred and fifty miles along
+the coast and inland from three hundred to four hundred miles.
+Physiographically it may be roughly divided into three zones," and so
+on for a considerable length until by an accident which Clarissa could
+attribute to nothing but inconceivable awkwardness, Judge Bording
+dropped a glass of water, crash! Having ceased his disquisition at
+this accident, so disconcerting to the judge, Miss Bording very
+prettily and promptly thanked him for his information and saying that
+she now had a clear understanding of the principal facts pertaining to
+Algeria, abruptly changed the subject by asking him if he had heard
+anything more concerning his second cousin, the barber.
+
+"There is nothing more to be heard. He is dead. You know he came here
+about a week before I did. By the terms of my uncle's will, the five
+years to be allowed to elapse before I was to be considered dead or
+disappeared would have come to an end in a week after the time of my
+arrival, and the property have passed to him, my uncle's cousin. By
+the greatest luck in the world, I had become homesick and throwing up
+my commission in the Foreign Legion, or Battalion D'Etranger, as we
+have it in French, which is, as you may know, a corps of foreigners
+serving under the French flag, mainly in Algeria, but occasionally in
+other French possessions--throwing up my commission, I came home,
+bringing with me my famous collection of weapons and the fauteuil of
+Ab del Kader, the armchair, you understand, of the great Arab prince
+who led the last revolt against France. It was not all homesickness,
+either. Among the men of all nationalities serving in the Foreign
+Legion, are many adventurous Americans, and a young Chicagoan,
+remarking my name, apprised me of the fact that perhaps I was heir to
+a fortune in Chicago. I came," continued Leadbury, looking down toward
+his lap, where Clarissa saw he held a clipping from a newspaper, "and
+took apartments at the Bennington Hotel, where, when seen by the
+representatives of the 'Commercial Advertiser,' the following
+interesting facts were brought out in the interview: 'William
+Leadbury'--your humble servant--" he interjected, "'is the only son of
+the late Charles Leadbury, only brother of the late millionaire iron
+merchant, James Leadbury. Upon his death, James Leadbury left his
+entire property'--but," said Leadbury, looking up, "I have previously
+covered that point."
+
+"But tell us of your weapons," interposed Miss Bording.
+
+"Oh, yes, that seems to interest you," and deftly sliding the clipping
+along in his fingers, he resumed: "'The collection of weapons is one
+of the most interesting and remarkable collections in the United
+States, for, though not large, its owner can say, with pardonable
+pride, "every bit of steel in that collection has been used by me in
+my trade."'"
+
+"Ah, how proud you must be," mused Miss Bording. "I read something
+like that in the papers, myself. Just to think of it! Every bit of
+steel in that collection has been used by you in your trade. What a
+strange affectation you military men have in calling your profession a
+trade! But, Captain Leadbury, tell me of your cousin, who disappeared
+two days after your arrival, and why you shaved your moustache which
+the papers described you as having."
+
+"A moustache is a bother," said Leadbury. "As to my cousin, why,
+overcome by disappointment, he took to drink. He disappeared from his
+lodgings on Rush Street two days after my arrival, at the close of a
+twenty-four hours' debauch. It was found he had shipped as a sailor on
+the Ingar Gulbrandson, lumber hooker for Marinette, and the
+Gulbrandson was found sunk up by Death's Door, at the entrance to
+Green Bay, her masts sticking above water. Her crew had utterly
+disappeared. That was three months ago and neither hide nor hair of
+any of them has been seen since. Poor Anderson Walkley is dead! Were
+he alive, I would be glad to assist him. But he was a rover, never
+long in one place--a few months here, a few months there--and now he
+is at rest and I believe he is glad, I believe he is glad."
+
+The second course consisted of turkey, and Clarissa was astounded, as
+she deposited the dishes of the course, to see Asbury Fuller swiftly
+enter the door upon all-fours and with extreme celerity and cat-like
+lightness, flit across the room and esconce himself behind a huge
+armchair upholstered in velvet, and her astonishment increased and was
+tinged with no small degree of terror, as she observed the chair,
+noiselessly and almost imperceptibly, progress across the floor,
+propelled by some hidden force, until it reached a station behind the
+master of the house. Captain Leadbury began to carve the turkey and
+Clarissa was astonished more than ever to hear, in the Captain's
+voice, though she was sure his lips were shut,
+
+"Would you like a close shave, Miss Bording?"
+
+The sound of the carving-knife dropping upon the platter as Leadbury
+started in some sudden spasm of pain, was drowned by the silvery
+laughter of Miss Bording, saying,
+
+"Oh, don't make fun of the profession of your poor cousin, Captain,"
+and the look of disquiet upon Leadbury's face was quickly relieved and
+he joined heartily and almost boisterously in the merriment. A moment
+later, Clarissa was alarmed to find him bending upon herself a look in
+which suspicion, distrust, fear, and hatred all were blended.
+
+Judge Volney Bording, ornament to the legal profession, was a hearty
+eater, and it was not long before he sent his plate for a second
+helping, and again Clarissa heard from the closed lips of Leadbury, in
+a voice that seemed to float up from his very feet:
+
+"Next. Next. You're next, Miss Bording. What'll it be?"
+
+Leadbury half rose, looking toward Clarissa with a glance of most
+violent anger, but whatever he would have said, was again interrupted
+by the silvery laugh of Miss Bording, and again Leadbury joined
+heartily, almost boisterously. But though he regained his
+self-possession and his brow became serene, Clarissa saw in his eye
+that which told he had a reckoning in store for her when once the
+guests were out of the house, but that in the meantime he would
+dissemble the various unpleasant emotions with which his mind was
+filled. The rest of the dinner passed without untoward event. The huge
+armchair by imperceptible degrees retired to its former position, and
+as Clarissa set down the dessert, she saw Asbury Fuller, with a grace
+unusual and not to be expected of one in such a posture, proceeding
+quickly and silently out of the room upon all-fours.
+
+Mindful of her instructions, Clarissa accompanied the party when,
+rising from the table, they withdrew to the drawing-room. It was
+manifest that her presence caused Leadbury some uneasiness and he
+looked now at her and now at his guests with an inquiring and
+perturbed countenance, but in the calm faces of the judge and his
+daughter he could detect nothing to indicate that they thought the
+presence of the page at all strange, and little by little he recovered
+his good spirits and related some interesting anecdotes of a bulldog
+he once owned and of a colored person who stole a guitar from him. But
+though Miss Bording gave a courteous and interested attention and
+laughed at the anecdotes of the dog, she irked at the necessity of
+silence, which the garrulity of her host placed her under and was
+desirous of having the conversation become general and of a more
+entertaining, elevated and instructive character. As the narration of
+the episode of the colored person came to an end, she hastily
+exclaimed:
+
+"Captain, you promised to show us your collection. It is nearing the
+time when we must go home, for father has had to-day to listen to an
+unparalleled amount of gabble and is very tired."
+
+"I will show the collection to you with great pleasure," said
+Leadbury, and at this juncture, Clarissa, remembering her
+instructions, said:
+
+"The collection of your former weapons, sir, has been placed in the
+first room at the left at the head of the stairs. The paperhangers and
+decorators have been busy." And then she proceeded to lead the way
+into the hall and up the broad funereal staircase that led above.
+Dimly burned the lights in the hall. Dimly burned a gas jet in the
+room whose door stood open at the left.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Leadbury, gaily, responding to a remark of Miss
+Bording, as they entered the room and saw the uncertain shape of a
+large chair vaguely looming in the gloom; "I secured the fauteuil of
+Ab del Kader after we had stormed the last stronghold of that
+unfortunate prince. But interesting as this relic is, I put no value
+upon it in comparison with the weapons, for every bit of steel in the
+collection has been used by me in my trade."
+
+As he said these words, he turned on the gas at full head and the
+light blazed forth to be shot back from an array of polished steel
+festooned upon the wall, a glittering rosette, but not of sabres and
+scimetars, yataghans, rapiers, broadswords, dirks and poniards,
+pistols, fusils and rifles. No! _Razors and scissors!_ Before this
+array sat a great red velvet barber's chair, and near them on the wall
+was a board, bearing little brass hooks, upon each of which hung a
+green ticket.
+
+In the unexpected revelation that had followed the flare of light, all
+eyes were turned upon William Leadbury, swaying back and forward with
+one hand clinging to the big chair, as if ready to swoon. A sickly,
+cringing grin played over his face, suddenly come all a-yellow, and
+his long tongue was flickering over his pale lips. But all at once his
+muscles sprang tense and a malignant anger tightened his quivering
+features and turning upon Clarissa, he hissed:
+
+"You did this. You exposed me, you exposed me," and he was about to
+leap at the terrified girl, when a ringing voice cried, "Stop!" and
+there was Asbury Fuller standing in the doorway with the broad red
+cordon of a Commander of the Legion of Honor across his breast and a
+glittering rapier in his hand. Clarissa could have fallen at his feet,
+he looked so handsome and grand, and she could have scratched out the
+eyes of Eulalia Bording, whose gaze betrayed an admiration equal to
+her own. Asbury Fuller, yet not wearing quite his wonted appearance,
+for the luxuriant locks of auburn had gone and his head was covered
+with a short, though thick crop of chestnut.
+
+"You exposed yourself. Harmless would all this have been, powerless to
+hurt you, if you had kept your self-possession and turned it off as a
+joke--your own. But your abashed mien, your complete confusion, your
+utter disconcertment, betrayed you, even if you had no longer left any
+question by crying out that you have been exposed. Yes, exposed,
+Anderson Walkley, by the sudden confronting of you with the implements
+of your craft, the weapons you had _used_ in _your_ trade, and the
+belief thus aroused in your guilty mind that your secret was known,
+that your identity had been detected."
+
+"Asbury Fuller, what business is it of yours?" and Leadbury snatched
+up a large pair of hair clippers and waved them with a menacing
+gesture.
+
+"Everyman to the weapons of his trade," exclaimed Asbury Fuller, and
+the hair clippers seemed suddenly enveloped in a mass of white flame,
+as the rapier played about them. Cling, clang, across the room flew
+the clippers, twisted from Leadbury's hand as neatly as you please.
+
+"Asbury Fuller?" cried the Commander of the Legion of Honor. "Asbury
+Fuller?" and he deftly fastened beneath his nose an elegant false
+moustache with waxed ends.
+
+With his hands before his eyes as if to forefend his view from some
+dreadful apparition, the man in the corner sank upon his knees,
+gibbering, "William Leadbury, come back from the dead!"
+
+"William Leadbury, alive and well, here to claim his own from you,
+Anderson Walkley, outlaw and felon. Your plans were well-laid, but I
+am not dead. You signed the papers of the Ingar Gulbrandson in your
+proper person. Then as she was about to sail, I was brought aboard
+ostensibly drunk, but really drugged, under the name of Anderson
+Walkley. The Gulbrandson was found sunk. Her crew of four had utterly
+disappeared. Dead, of course. The records gave their names. I had
+become Anderson Walkley and was dead. You had seized my property and
+my identity. I had been in Chicago but two days and no one had become
+familiar enough with my appearance to make any question when you with
+your clean-shaven face came down on the morning after my
+kidnaping and told the people at the hotel that you were William
+Leadbury and had shaved your moustache off over night. Whatever
+difference they might have thought they saw, was easily explained by
+the change occasioned by the removal of your moustache. Had your
+minions been as intelligent as they were villainous, your scheme would
+have succeeded. It was necessary to drug me anew on the voyage, as the
+effects were wearing off. They did not drug me enough, and when they
+scuttled the old hulk and rowed ashore to flee with their blood money,
+the cold water rising in the sinking vessel awoke me, brought me to
+full consciousness, and I easily got ashore on some planking. I saw at
+once what the plot had been. I realized I had a desperate man to deal
+with. I had no money and it would take me some time to get from
+northern Wisconsin to Chicago. In the meantime, every one would have
+come to believe you William Leadbury, and who would believe me, the
+ragged tramp, suddenly appearing from nowhere and claiming to be the
+heir? You would be coached by your lawyers, have time to concoct lies,
+to manufacture conditions that would color your claim, and in court
+you would be self-possessed and on your guard. Therefore I felt that I
+must await the psychological moment when you could be taken off your
+guard, when, surprised and in confusion, you would betray yourself. I
+secured employment as your butler, the psychological moment came, and
+you stand, self-convicted, thief and would-be murderer."
+
+"Send for the police at once," said Judge Bording.
+
+"No," said the late captain in the Foreign Legion. "He may reform. I
+wish him to have another chance. That he may have the wherewithal to
+earn a livelihood, I present him with the contents of this room, the
+means of his undoing. In my uncle's library are many excellent
+theological works of a controversial nature, and these, too, I present
+to him, as a means of turning his thoughts toward better things. I
+will not send for the police. I will send for a dray. Judge Bording,
+by the recent concatenation of events, I am become the host. Let us
+leave Walkley here to pack his effects, and return to the
+drawing-room."
+
+Clarissa preceded the others as they slowly descended, with all her
+ears open to hear whatsoever William Leadbury might say to Eulalia
+Bording, and it was so that she noted a strange little creaking above
+them, and looking up, saw poised upon the edge of the balustrade in
+the upper hall, impending over the head of William Leadbury and ready
+to fall, the great barber chair! With a swift leap, she pushed him to
+the wall, causing him to just escape the chair as it fell with a
+dreadful crash. But she herself was not so fortunate, for with a
+wicked tunk the cushioned back of the chair struck her a glancing blow
+that felled her senseless upon the stairs.
+
+Judge Bording flew after the dastardly barber, who swifter still, was
+down the backstairs and out of the house into the darkness before the
+Judge could lay hands upon him.
+
+The judge, his daughter, and William Leadbury, bent over the
+unconscious form of the page.
+
+"He saved your life," said the judge. "The wood and iron part would
+have hit your head."
+
+"His breath is knocked out of him," said Miss Bording.
+
+"He saved my life. I cannot understand his strange devotion. I cannot
+understand it," said William Leadbury, the while opening the page's
+vest, tearing away his collar, and straining at his shirt, that the
+stunned lungs might have play and get to work again. The stiffly
+starched shirt resisted his efforts and he reached in under it to
+detach the fastenings of the studs that held the bosom together. Back
+came his hand as if it had encountered a serpent beneath that shirt
+front.
+
+"I begin to understand," he exclaimed, and bending an enigmatical look
+upon the startled judge and his daughter, he picked the page up in his
+arms with the utmost tenderness, and bore him away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pains in Clarissa's body had left her. Indeed, they had all but
+gone when on Sunday morning, after a night which had been one of
+formless dreams where she had not known whether she slept or waked or
+where she was, a frowsy maid had called her from the bed where she lay
+beneath a blanket, fully dressed, and told her it was time she was
+getting back to the city. Not a sign of William Leadbury as she passed
+out of the great silent house. Not a word from him, no inquiry for the
+welfare of the little page who had come so nigh dying for him.
+Clarissa was too proud to do or say anything to let the frowsy maid
+guess that she wondered at this or cared aught for the ungrateful
+captain. She steeled her heart against him, but though as the days
+went by she succeeded in ceasing to care for one who was so unworthy
+of her regard, she could not stifle the poignant regret that he was
+thus unworthy.
+
+It had come Friday evening, almost closing time in the great store.
+Slowly and heavily, Clarissa was setting her counter in order,
+preparing to go to her lodgings and nurse her sick heart until slumber
+should give respite from her pain, when there came a messenger from
+the dress-making department asking her presence there.
+
+"We've just got an order for a ready-made ball-dress for a lady that
+is unexpectedly going to the Charity Ball to-night," said Mrs.
+McGuffin, head of the department. "The message says the lady is just
+your height and build and color--she noticed you sometime, it
+seems--and that we are to fit one of the dresses to you, making such
+alterations as would make it fit you, choosing one suitable to your
+complexion. When it's done, to save time, you are to go right to the
+person who ordered it, without stopping to change your clothes. You
+can do that there. It will make her late to the ball, at best. A
+carriage and a person to conduct you will be waiting."
+
+It was a magnificent dress that was gradually built upon the figure of
+Clarissa, and when at last it was completed and she stood before the
+great pier glass flushed with the radiance of a pleasure she could not
+but feel despite her late sorrow and the fact she was but the lay
+figure for a more fortunate woman, one would have to search far to
+find a more beautiful creature.
+
+"Whyee!" exclaimed Mrs. McGuffin. "Why, I had no idea you had such a
+figure. Why, I must have you in my department to show off dresses on.
+You will work at the cutlery counter not a day after to-morrow. But
+there, I am keeping you. The ball must almost have begun. Here's a bag
+with your things in it. I was going to say, 'your other things.'" And
+throwing a splendid cloak about the lovely shoulders of Miss Clarissa,
+Mrs. McGuffin turned her over to the messenger.
+
+There was already somebody in the carriage into which Clarissa
+stepped, but as the curtain was drawn across the opposite window, she
+was unable to even conjecture the sex of the individual who was to be
+her conductor to her destination, and steeped in dreams which from
+pleasant ones quickly passed to bitter, she speedily forgot all about
+the person at her side. But presently she perceived their carriage had
+come into the midst of a squadron of other carriages charging down
+upon a brilliantly lighted entrance where men and women, brave in
+evening dress, were moving in.
+
+"Why, we are going to the ball-room itself," and as she said this and
+realized that here on the very threshold of the entrancing gayeties
+she was to put off her fine plumage and see the other woman pass out
+of the dressing-room into the delights beyond, while she crept away in
+her own simple garb amid the questioning, amused, and contemptuous
+stares of the haughty dames who had witnessed the exchange, she broke
+into a piteous sob.
+
+"Why, of course to the ball-room, my darling," breathed a voice, which
+low though it was, thrilled her more than the voice of an archangel,
+and she felt herself strained to a man's heart and her bare shoulders,
+which peeped from the cloak at the thrust of a pair of strong arms
+beneath it, came in contact with the cool, smooth surface of the bosom
+of a dress shirt. "Don't you remember that I engaged the second
+two-step at the Charity Ball?"
+
+Clarissa, almost swooning with joy as she reclined palpitating upon
+the manly breast of Captain William Leadbury, said never a word, for
+the power of speech was not in her; the power of song, of uttering
+peans of joy, perhaps, but not the power of speech.
+
+"Have I assumed too much," said Leadbury, gravely, relaxing somewhat
+the tightness of his embrace. "Have I, arguing from the fact that you
+both served me in the crisis of my career and saved my life, assumed
+too much in believing you love me? If so, I beg your pardon for
+arranging this surprise. I will release you. I----"
+
+"Oh, no," crooned Clarissa, nestling against him with all the
+quivering protest of a child about to be taken from its mother. "You
+read my actions rightly. Oh, how I have suffered this week. No word
+from you. I could not understand it. Of course you could not know I
+was a girl. But I thought you ought to be grateful, even to a boy."
+
+"But I did know you were a girl. When you fell, I began to open the
+clothes about your chest. When I discovered your sex, I carried you
+upstairs, placed you on a bed, threw a blanket over you and was about
+to call Miss Bording to take charge of you----"
+
+"I'm glad you didn't. I don't like Miss Bording," said Clarissa.
+
+"I had left to call her, when that poltroon of an Anderson Walkley,
+who had stolen back into the house after running from it, crept behind
+me and struck me back of the ear with a shaving mug. I dropped
+unconscious. In the resulting confusion, your very existence was as
+forgotten as your whereabouts was unknown. You lay there as I had left
+you until a maid found you in the morning and packed you off. It was
+not until Wednesday that I was able to be out. I knew you came from
+this store, and mousing about in there, I had no trouble in
+identifying the nice young page with the beautiful young woman at the
+cutlery counter. I could scarce wait two days, but as three had
+already passed, I planned this surprise, remembering our banter when I
+talked with you, disguised as a man of fifty, and now you are to go in
+with me as my affianced bride. We'd better hurry, for the driver must
+be wondering what we are thinking about."
+
+It was worthy of remark that even the ladies passed many compliments
+upon the beauty and grace of Miss Clarissa Dawson, the young woman who
+came to the ball with William Leadbury, former captain in the army of
+the Republique Francaise, heir to the millions of the late James
+Leadbury, and a number of persons esteemed judges of all that pertains
+to the Terpsichorean art, declared that when she appeared upon the
+floor for the first time, which was to dance the second two-step with
+the gallant soldier, that such was the surpassing grace with which she
+revolved over the floor that one might well say she seemed to be
+dancing upon air.
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Sixth Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+"It is strange," said Mr. Middleton, "that after Clarissa had shown
+her devotion to the extent of saving his life, Captain Leadbury could
+have had, even for a moment, any misgivings that she loved him."
+
+"One cannot always be sure," said the emir. "A lover, being in a
+highly nervous state because of his emotion, is always more or less
+unstrung and unable to form a sound judgment or behave rationally. It
+is because of this, that there are so many lovers' quarrels. But one
+need not be at sea as regards the question of the affection of the
+object of his tender passion. It is only necessary for you to wear a
+philter upon the forehead and you can obtain the love of any woman,"
+and giving Mesrour some directions, the Nubian brought to his master a
+minute bag of silk an inch square and of wafer thinness, which, both
+from its appearance and the rare odor of musk which it exhaled,
+resembled a sachet bag.
+
+"Wear this on your forehead," said the emir, presenting it to Mr.
+Middleton.
+
+"But I would look ridiculous doing that, and excite comment,"
+expostulated the student of law.
+
+"Not at all," said the emir. "Put it inside the sweat-band of the
+front of your hat and no one will perceive it and yet it will have all
+its potency."
+
+Which, accordingly, Mr. Middleton did, and having thanked the emir for
+his entertainment and instruction and the gift, he departed.
+
+The close of the relation of the adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson
+left Mr. Middleton in a most amorous mood. His mind was full of soft
+dreams of the delight William Leadbury must have experienced as he sat
+in the hack with Clarissa's cheek against his, pouring forth his love
+into her surprised ear. Before retiring for the night, he sat for some
+time ciphering on the back of an envelope and kept putting down
+"$1,000, $500, $560; $560, $500, $1,000; $500, $560, $1,000; $500,
+$1,000, $560," but as the result of the addition was never over
+$2,060, whatever way he put it, and as the stipend he received for his
+labors in the law offices of Brockelsby and Brockman was but $26 a
+month, he did not feel that he had any business to snatch the young
+lady of Englewood to his breast and tell her of his love and his bank
+account.
+
+He went to see her on the following night. The exquisite beauty of
+this peerless young woman had never so impressed him as upon this
+night and he was gnawed by the most intense longing to call her his
+own. As he thought of the fortunate William Leadbury with his rich
+uncle, he fairly hated him, and anon he cursed Brockelsby and Brockman
+for refusing to raise his salary to a point commensurate with the
+value of his services. Surely, the young lady of Englewood, even were
+he to believe her gifted with only ordinary penetration, instead of
+being the highly intelligent and perspicacious person he knew her to
+be, could see how he felt and must know that it was only a question of
+time and more money, and assuredly, one so gracious could not, in view
+of the circumstances, begrudge him the advance of one kiss and one
+embrace pending the formal offer of himself and his fortunes. So as he
+stood in the doorway, bidding her good-night, right in the midst of an
+irrelevant remark concerning the weather, he suddenly and without
+warning, threw his arms about her and essayed to kiss her. But the
+young lady of Englewood, with a cry commingled of surprise and horror,
+sprang away.
+
+"How dare you sir? What made you do that? What sort of a girl do you
+think I am?" she said in freezing tones.
+
+Mr. Middleton replied, stuttering weakly in a very husky voice, "I
+think you are a nice girl."
+
+"A nice girl!" quoth the young lady of Englewood fiercely. "You know
+no nice girl would allow it. Nice girl, indeed. You think so. You know
+no nice girl would let you do such a thing," and she slammed the door
+in his face.
+
+Away went Mr. Middleton with his heart full of bitterness because she
+would not let him do such a thing, and in the hallway stood the young
+lady of Englewood with her heart full of bitterness because he had
+tried to do such a thing and because she could not let him do such a
+thing.
+
+"Much good was the philter," said Mr. Middleton, remembering the
+emir's gift, but almost at the same time, he recalled that the philter
+had not been on his forehead when he attempted to embrace the young
+lady of Englewood, for he had held his hat in his hand.
+
+The farther he departed from her, the more his resentment grew, and he
+declared to himself that he would never have anything more to do with
+her. She was ungrateful, cold, haughty, not at all the kind of girl he
+could wish as his partner for life. He would proceed to let her see
+that he could do without her. He would cast her image from the temple
+of his heart and never go near her again. For a moment, he was
+disturbed by the thought that perhaps she would decline to receive
+him, even if he should call, but he quickly banished this unpleasant
+reflection and fell to devising means by which he might make it
+clearly apparent to the young lady of Englewood that he did not care.
+
+"I'll make her sorry. I'll show her I don't care, I'll show her I
+don't care."
+
+There is a restaurant under the basement of one of the larger and more
+celebrated saloons of the city, where a genial Gaul provides, for the
+modest sum of fifty cents, a course dinner, with wine. The wine is but
+ordinary California claret, but the viands are excellently cooked and
+of themselves sufficient inducement for a wight to part with half a
+dollar without consideration of the wine. There are those who, in the
+melancholy state that follows a disappointment in love, go without
+food and drink, while others turn to undue indulgence in drink. There
+are yet others, though few observers seem to have noted them, who turn
+toward greater indulgence in food, seeking surcease and forgetfulness
+of the pains of the heart in benefactions to the stomach.
+
+It was very seldom that Mr. Middleton spent so much as fifty cents
+upon a meal, but the conduct of the young lady of Englewood having
+deprived him of any present object for laying up money, and, moreover,
+the pains of the heart before alluded to demanding the vicarious
+offices of the stomach, he went to the little French restaurant the
+next evening.
+
+It was somewhat late when he arrived and there were in the room but
+two diners beside himself. These were a man and a woman, who by many
+little obvious evidences made manifest that they were not husband and
+wife. They had arrived at the dessert and were eating ice cream with
+genteel slowness, conversing the while with great decorum. Both were
+tall and fair, singularly well matched as to height and the ample and
+shapely proportions of their figures, and both were well, though
+quietly and even simply, dressed. They were nearly of an age, too, he
+being apparently forty, and she thirty-five. Their years sat lightly
+upon them, however, and if upon her face there were traces left by the
+longing for the lover who had not yet come into her life, that was all
+which upon either countenance betrayed that their lives had been other
+than care-free and happy. Assuredly, any one would have called them a
+fine looking man and woman. All this Mr. Middleton observed in a
+glance or two and then addressed himself to the comestibles that were
+set before him and doubtless would not have given the couple thought
+again, had not the waitress at the close of the meal fluttered at his
+elbows, placing the vinegar cruet and Worcestershire sauce bottle
+within easy reach, which services caused Mr. Middleton to look up in
+some wonder, as he was engaged with custard pie and he had never heard
+of any race of men, however savage, who used vinegar and
+Worcestershire sauce upon custard pie. The waitress, who was a young
+woman of a pleasant and intelligent countenance, met this glance with
+another compounded of mystery and communicativeness, and bending low
+while she removed the vinegar and Worcestershire sauce to a new
+station, murmured:
+
+"That man over there has been here seven nights running, with a
+different woman every time."
+
+Mr. Middleton sitting quiet in the surprise this information caused
+him, she repeated what she had said, adding, "and once he was here at
+noon besides, different woman every time."
+
+Eight women in seven days! Certainly this was quite a curious thing.
+
+"Do you know who he is? Have you ever seen any of the women before?"
+
+"Nop. Don't know anything about him except what I have seen of him
+here. Never saw any of the women before--nor since."
+
+Nor since. Mr. Middleton found himself asking himself if anybody had
+seen any of the women since. Had the girl in this chance remark
+unwittingly hit upon a terrible mystery? Nor since, nor since.
+
+The man who had so suddenly assumed an interest in Mr. Middleton's
+eyes, arose, and going to the window, looked out at the street above,
+which was spattered with a sudden shower. He began to lament that he
+had not brought an umbrella and said he would go after one, when the
+storm so increased in violence that even a person provided with an
+umbrella--as was Mr. Middleton--would not care to venture into it, for
+such was the might of the wind now filling the air with its shrieks,
+that the rain swept in great lateral sheets which made an umbrella a
+futile protection. Yet notwithstanding this fury of the elements, the
+man of many women went out.
+
+A half hour went by. An hour, and the storm did not abate and the man
+did not return. The good-looking waitress invited Mr. Middleton to sit
+at ease by a table in a rear part of the room, where lolling on the
+opposite side, with charming unconsciousness she let her hand lie
+stretched more than half across the board, a rampart of crumpled
+newspapers concealing it from the view of the eighth guest of the
+mulierose man. But whatever Mr. Middleton had done on previous
+occasions and might do on occasions yet to come, he now wished to
+avoid all appearances that might cause the eighth woman to regard him
+as at all inclined to other than discreet and modest conduct, for he
+was resolved to find out what he could about the man and eight women.
+So affecting not to note the hand temptingly disposed, he discoursed
+in a voice which was plainly audible in every corner of the room, not
+so much because of its loudness--for he had but little raised it--as
+because of a distinct and precise enunciation. This very precision,
+which always implies a regard for the rules, proprieties and amenities
+of life, seemed to stamp him as a man worthy of confidence, even had
+not his sentiments been of the most high-minded character. He
+described the great flood of 1882, which wrought such havoc in
+Missouri, in which cataclysm his Uncle Henry Perkins had suffered
+great loss. He extolled the commendable conduct of his uncle in
+sacrificing valuable property that he might save a woman; letting a
+flatboat loaded with twenty-five hogs whirl away in the raging flood,
+in order to rescue a woman from Booneville, Missouri, the wife of a
+county judge, who was floating in the waste of waters upon a small red
+barn. The dullest could infer from the approval he gave this act of
+his Uncle Henry, unwisely chivalrous as it might seem in view of the
+fact that whoever rescued the judge's wife farther down stream, would
+return her to the judge, while no one would return the hogs to Mr.
+Perkins--the dullest could infer from his praise that he was himself a
+chivalrous and tender young man whom any woman could trust.
+
+The hour was become an hour and a half and both the pretty waitress
+and the eighth woman had grown very fidgetty. The waitress saw she was
+to beguile the tedious period of emprisonment by the tempest with no
+dalliance with Mr. Middleton. The eighth woman was worried by the
+absence of her escort. Mr. Middleton stepped to her side, where she
+stood staring out at the wind-swept street, and addressed her.
+
+"Madame, it would almost seem as if some accident had detained your
+escort. May I not offer to call a cab and see you home? I have an
+umbrella with me."
+
+The lady thanked him almost eagerly, saying that she would wait
+fifteen minutes more and at the elapse of that time, her escort not
+appearing, would gladly avail herself of his kind offer.
+
+Twenty minutes later, they were whirling away northward. Crossing the
+Wells Street bridge, they turned eastward only a few blocks from the
+river. The rain had suddenly ceased. The wind having relaxed nothing
+of its fierceness, it occasionally parted the scudding clouds high
+over head to let glimpses of the moon escape from their wrack, and Mr.
+Middleton saw he was in a region whence the invasion of factories and
+warehouses had driven the major portion of the inhabitants forth,
+leaving their dwellings untenanted, white for rent signs staring out
+of the empty casements like so many ghosts. The lady signaling the
+driver to stop, Mr. Middleton assisted her to alight, and glanced
+about him. Here the work of exile had been very thorough. Not yet had
+the factories come into this immediate neighborhood, but the residents
+had retreated before the smoke of their advancing lines, leaving a
+wide unoccupied space behind the rear guard. Up and down the street,
+in no house could he perceive a light. The moon shining forth clear
+and resplendent, its face unobstructed by clouds for a moment, he saw
+stretching away house after house with white signs that grimly told
+their loneliness. Indeed, quite deserted did appear the very house to
+whose door they splashed through the pools in the depressions of the
+tall flight of stone steps. The lady threw open the door and stepped
+briskly in, and her footfalls rang sharply upon a bare floor and
+resounded in a hollow echo that told it was an empty house!
+
+An empty house! An empty house! What danger might lurk here and how
+easy might losels lure victims to their door! Mr. Middleton paused on
+the threshold, staring into the gloom, but whatever irresolute
+thoughts he had entertained of retreat were dispelled by the sound of
+a wail from the lady, and the sight of her face, white in the
+moonlight, as she rushed out to him.
+
+"Oh, oh," she moaned, gibbering a gush of words which, despite their
+incoherence of form, in their tone proclaimed fear, consternation, and
+despair.
+
+Lighting a match, Mr. Middleton stepped into the house. Standing in
+the little circle of dull yellow light, he saw beneath his feet
+windrows of dust and layers of newspapers that had rested beneath a
+carpet but lately removed, and beyond, dusk emptiness, and silence. He
+advanced, looking for a chandelier, but though he found two, the
+incandescent globes had been removed from them. Throwing a mass of the
+papers from the floor into the grate and lighting them, a bright glare
+brought out every corner of the room. There was nothing but the four
+bare walls.
+
+"They have taken everything, everything!" cried the poor lady.
+
+"Who?" asked Mr. Middleton, after the manner of his profession.
+
+"Who? Would that I knew!--Thieves."
+
+Mr. Middleton then realized she had been the victim of a form of
+robbery far too common, where the scoundrels come with drays and carry
+off the whole household equipment, in the householder's absence. That
+which had been done in comparatively well-populated quarters was easy
+of accomplishment on this deserted street.
+
+Penetrated with compassion, he moved toward the unfortunate woman, who
+with an abandonment he had not expected of one so stately and
+reserved, threw herself upon his breast, weeping as though her heart
+would break.
+
+"They have taken everything. How can I get along now! My piano is gone
+and how can I give lessons without it! I will have to go back to
+Peoria!"
+
+Soothingly Mr. Middleton patted the weeping woman on the back. With
+infinite tenderness, he kissed her tear-bedewed cheeks and gently he
+laid her head upon his shoulder, and then with both arms clasped about
+her, he imparted to her statuesque figure a sort of rocking motion,
+crooning with each oscillation, "There, there, there, there," until
+the paroxysm of her grief abated and passed from weeping into
+gradually subsiding sobs, and he began to tell her that he would be
+only too happy to give his legal services to convict the villains when
+caught--as they surely would be. The lady by degrees becoming more
+cheerful and giving him a description of the stolen property, he
+discussed ways and means of recovering it, and to prevent her from
+relapsing into her former depressed condition, occasionally imprinted
+a consolatory salute upon her cheek, from which he had previously
+wiped the wet tracks of the tears that had now some time ceased
+gushing, for there had been a salty taste to the first osculations,
+which while not actually disagreeable, had not been to his liking.
+
+At length, the lady not only ceased even to sigh, but even to talk,
+and yet remained leaning upon him, which was whether because she was
+weary, exhausted by grief, or whether because her supporter was such a
+good looking young man, is not evident. Doubtless it was true that at
+first her misery and unhappiness made her need the sympathetic
+caresses of any one within reach and that with the return of her
+equilibrium she continued to make this an excuse for enjoying without
+any reproach of impropriety a recreation which ordinarily the
+conventions of society would compel her to eschew. As for the rising
+light in the legal profession, he began to find the weight she leant
+upon him oppressive, and his occupation, delightful at first, palling
+and growing monotonous. The monotony he somewhat relieved by
+frequently kissing her, now on one velvet cheek, now on the other, and
+again her lips; slowly, one two, three, in waltz measure; and rapidly,
+one, two three, four, in two-step measure, when all at once in the
+midst of a sustained half note there came to him the reflection that
+this was no time of night for him to be there in the dark in a
+deserted house kissing a woman with whose social standing, whose very
+name, he was unacquainted. He was about to ask a few leading
+questions, when there was the sound of wheels in the street; a
+carriage stopped before the door.
+
+Quickly extricating himself from the lady's arms, Mr. Middleton
+stepped to the door, only to see the carriage drive away, the sound of
+voices singing a solemn chant in a strange and unknown tongue floating
+back to him. Wondering what all this could mean, he turned to find the
+lady standing at his side, silently regarding him in a wrapt manner.
+
+"The hour is late," said she, in a hollow, mournful voice, "and I
+ought to be seeking some shelter where I can lay my head, but where,
+oh, where?"
+
+The lady made a tragic gesture as she asked this question, and there
+in that lonely street with this lorn woman at this late hour of the
+night in the eerie light of the cloud-obscured moon, with the wind,
+now howling and now sobbing and moaning, Mr. Middleton felt very
+solemn indeed. But he pulled himself together and suggested a
+low-priced and respectable hotel not far away, and toward this they
+were faring when they passed a house which, unlike most of the others
+of the vicinity, bore signs of habitation, and unlike any of the
+others, had a light showing in a window. In fact, there was a light in
+every window of the two upper stories and in the windows of the first
+floor and even in the basement. Pausing to wonder at this unusual
+illumination, Mr. Middleton felt his arm suddenly clutched, and a
+voice which he would never have believed came from the lady, if there
+had been any one else present, grated into his ear, "It's him."
+
+Though startled by this enigmatical utterance, he followed when she
+ascended two steps of the stoop for a better view in the uncurtained
+window. There, with his face buried in his hands, seated on a roll of
+carpeting with a tack hammer and saucer of tacks at his side, sat the
+mulierose man!
+
+"This house was empty at four this afternoon," said the lady.
+"Heavens, that's my piano in the corner! That's my center table! I
+believe that's my carpet! That's my watercolor painting I painted
+myself! _He's_ robbed me!"
+
+Her voice rose to a shriek, and at the sound a woman's head popped out
+of the window above and the mulierose man came running to the door. He
+was in his shirt sleeves but wore a hat.
+
+"You've robbed me, you've robbed me!" cried the lady.
+
+"I haven't," said the mulierose man with the utmost composure. "I can
+explain it all satisfactorily. Come in. My Aunt Eliza is here and tea
+is ready. Where were you when I went back to the restaurant? They said
+you had gone. Where were you?"
+
+To Mr. Middleton's surprise, the lady immediately quieted at the words
+of the mulierose man and instead of berating him, coughed nervously
+and hung her head sheepishly.
+
+"Where were you?" repeated the man.
+
+"At my house."
+
+"All this time? With this young man?" There was a tinge of hardness
+and jealousy in the man's voice and he looked unpleasantly at Mr.
+Middleton. "What did you stay in that empty house all this time for?
+What-were-you-doing-there?"
+
+Mr. Middleton was at his wit's end to supply a hypothesis to answer
+why the mulierose man, from being a criminal and object of the lady's
+just wrath, should suddenly have become an inquisitor, sitting in
+judgment upon her conduct.
+
+"I--I--was afraid to start right away. It was dark in there and I was
+afraid this young man might take liberties. Indeed, he did try to kiss
+me."
+
+With a roar, the mulierose man launched himself at Mr. Middleton, who
+dexterously stepping aside, had the satisfaction of seeing his
+assailant slip and fall on the wet sidewalk. The lady thereat raised a
+cry of great volume, which was taken up by the woman looking out of
+the window above, and Mr. Middleton thinking he could derive neither
+pleasure nor profit from remaining longer in that locality, fled
+incontinently.
+
+Upon his arrival home and preparing for bed, he found that he was
+wearing a stiff hat made in Kansas City, bearing on the sweat-band a
+silver plate inscribed "George W. Dobson." The mulierose man and he
+had exchanged hats at the restaurant. The mulierose man now had the
+love philter.
+
+It was not until four days had elapsed that Mr. Middleton found an
+opportunity to visit the street where these inexplicable events took
+place. The house where he had comforted the eighth woman was still
+empty. At the house whence the mulierose man had issued, a very
+unprepossessing old woman, with a teapot in her right hand, was
+opening the front door to admit a large yellow cat whom she addressed
+as "Mahoney," an appellation which, while not infrequently the family
+name of persons of Irish birth or descent, is of very seldom
+application to members of the domestic cat tribe, Felis cattus.
+
+Wondering greatly at the chain of unusual events, he went about his
+business. You may depend upon it that he gave much thought to an
+attempted solution of all these mysteries. But whether or no it was
+after all only a series of events commonplace in themselves, but
+seeming mysterious because of their fortuitous concatenation, or he
+really had trodden upon the hem of a web of strange and darksome,
+perhaps appalling, mysteries, he has never been able to say. He was
+minded to speak of these things to the emir and get his opinion on
+them. Upon reflection, remembering how the philter had not been of any
+avail in the case of the young lady of Englewood, he thought, despite
+the explanation which might be offered for this failure, that the emir
+might be embarrassed at hearing of the failure of the charm, and
+accordingly he said nothing when once more he sat in the presence of
+the urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having
+handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to
+narrate The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman.
+
+
+
+
+_The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman._
+
+
+Dr. August Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and
+religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of
+impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge
+of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and
+mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as
+recognized by Occidentals, is by them pronounced either magic and
+feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and
+deluding prestidigitation. There was a legend among the students of
+his department that he was wont to project himself into the fourth
+dimension and thus traveling downtown, effect a substantial saving of
+street-car fare. This is clearly impossible, for the yogis do not thus
+move about in their own persons. It is only the astral self that flies
+leagues through the air with the rapidity of thought, only the
+spiritual essence, the living man's ghost flying abroad while the
+living man's corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August
+Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western
+nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult
+of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done
+and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell
+nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and
+awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed to do, none
+can be assigned to any other origin than cunning legerdemain and
+hypnotism, or to the exercise of supernatural powers. Many of them are
+due to a strange and wonderful knowledge of nature which the science
+of the Occident has not yet reached in all its boasted advance. Yet
+when once explained, the Westerner understands some of these phenomena
+and is able to repeat them. Into this region of the penumbra of
+science and exact knowledge the researches of Dr. Moehrlein had taken
+him a little way and it was this that had gained him his reputation
+among his pupils as a thaumaturgist.
+
+Along with the learning which this country has imported from Germany
+have come some customs to which the savants of both that country and
+this ascribe a certain fostering influence, if not a creative impulse,
+highly advantageous to the national scholarship. It is the habit of
+the university men of Germany to foregather of nights in the genial
+pursuit of drinking beer, and many of the notable theories which
+German scholarship has propounded are to be directly attributed to
+this stimulating good fellowship known as kommers. Indeed, when one
+has imbibed twelve or fourteen steins of beer and sat in an atmosphere
+of tobacco smoke for some hours, his mind attains a clarity, a sense
+of proportion, a power of reflection, speculation, and intuition which
+enables him to evolve those notable theories for which German
+scholarship is so famous. It is under the intellectual stimulus of the
+kommers, when the foam lies thick in the steins and blue clouds of
+tobacco smoke roll overhead, that the great classical scholars of
+Germany perceive that the classical epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
+Aeneid, are but the typifying of the rolling of the clouds in the
+empyrean, the warfare of the foam-crested waves dashing upon the land,
+that the metamorphoses and amours of the gods and all the myths of the
+elder world, are but the mutations of the clouds and the fanciful
+figures they take on and the metamorphoses and hurryings of the
+ever-changing sea with its foam forms and the shadows that lie across
+its unquiet surface. Wonderful indeed is the scientific imagination
+that thus accounts for, classifies, and labels the imagination of the
+poets, which otherwise we might think a thing defying classification,
+an inspiration, a creative genius taking nothing from a dim suggestion
+of the cold clouds and sea, but weaving its tales from the suggestion
+of human lives and human passions. Wonderful indeed is the good sense
+of the rest of the world in accepting unquestioned these important
+discoveries of German scholars in the beer kellars, which well might
+be called the laboratories of the classical department of the German
+universities.
+
+Dr. August Moehrlein was a staunch advocate of the advantage of the
+kommers as an adjunct to every thoroughly organized university. If he
+could not gather others for a kommers, he would hold a kommers all by
+himself, or perchance with the barkeeper. Needless to say that the
+name of Moehrlein was attached to many valuable and plausible theories
+which America received as the last word on the subject treated;
+needless to tell you that the various gods of India had been
+identified with the sun, moon, and more important stars, and that it
+was conclusively shown that the Sanskrit romancers had written their
+tales by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Would that this
+accomplishment of the ancients had not gone from us and that the
+moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds
+and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his
+wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected
+to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of
+intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the
+world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun,
+but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual effort. In his
+search for the suggestions of the tale of Nala, he had acquired a
+paunch very like a bag. Mrs. Moehrlein was accustomed to shrink from
+the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he
+would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always
+present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of
+memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy,
+middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal
+beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal
+all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and
+lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many
+years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly
+as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the clouds and the sea.
+
+It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of
+birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The
+eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his
+wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled
+cabbage.
+
+"Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into
+the box; thirty years since we have been man and--woman."
+
+"Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor
+young Hilsenhoff."
+
+She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret
+and this did not escape the doctor.
+
+"One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was
+young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late
+champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of
+learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife
+of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the
+passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten
+years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire
+for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of
+Ganesha and Vishnu, when a goddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So
+when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole
+repository of the secret of his whereabouts--that the mutton-headed
+police might not interfere with the success of his experiment by
+preventing what they might think practically suicide--you said to let
+him stay."
+
+"I was twenty and he thirty," mused the woman. "Poor young
+Hilsenhoff."
+
+"Young! I was twenty-three--and a man."
+
+"Dead or alive, he is young Hilsenhoff to me. He was thirty when last
+I saw him."
+
+"Dead or alive? What are you thinking of?"
+
+An idea had been taking shape in the woman's mind without her
+realizing it. It had grown from her own words, rather than had the
+words sprung from the idea.
+
+"Why, if a man be brought into a condition where all bodily functions
+are suspended and he is as he were dead, and remain in this condition
+for months and be brought out of it no more harmed than if he had
+slept overnight, why may it not be years, instead of months? Has any
+man ever proved that, in this condition, one may not live on
+indefinitely?" she said.
+
+"No man has ever proved that one cannot, but what is more important,
+no man has ever proved that one can. No man has ever proved beyond
+shadow of doubt that one may not fashion wings and fly, but no man has
+ever demonstrated that one can. In India, only one man has ever tried
+to continue in a state of suspended animation for over six months, and
+that was the rajah who, condemned to death by the English, ostensibly
+died before the soldiers could come to carry out the sentence and was
+brought out of his tomb and restored to life three days after a new
+British viceroy had proclaimed a general amnesty to all past
+offenders. The period was eight months. If the viceroys had not been
+changed for a number of years, we might have learned more concerning
+the length of the period in which a man may continue in the semblance
+of death without it becoming reality. No, these twenty-five years has
+Hilsenhoff been bones."
+
+"Then let us take them out and bury them."
+
+"No, no. Then would I feel like a murderer indeed. I left him in there
+for you. Now let his bones rest there for sake of me."
+
+But the woman had become possessed of an idea which in turn possessed
+her, a dream, for which like all mankind, she would fight harder than
+for any substantiality, for no reality can be so glorious as a dream.
+
+"But there was the man at Sutlej, the man who had himself buried in a
+wheat field for the edification of Alexander the Great, there to
+remain until a wheat crop had passed through its stages from sowing
+until harvest."
+
+"The man at Sutlej!" exclaimed the doctor impatiently. "That a man was
+thus buried, the pages of Quintus Curtius's history show, and the
+Macedonian armies suddenly retreating from India, he was forgotten and
+not one, but two thousand wheat harvests have been garnered over his
+burial place."
+
+"But the article in the _Revue Des Deux Mondes_, telling how he had
+been found," objected the woman faintly.
+
+The doctor looked at her in amazement.
+
+"What will not people do to believe that which they wish to believe.
+You, you, you!--do you ask me concerning that lie in the _Revue Des
+Deux Mondes_? Oh, woman, woman! When did your memory of the details of
+that hoax fail you? Not longer ago than ten minutes. A lying Frenchman
+said he was on his way to France with a resuscitated contemporary of
+Alexander the Great and that a full account of the matter would be
+published in two or three months. Hilsenhoff left the duration of his
+stay in the box at my discretion, enjoining me, however, that he
+should not be taken out before the Frenchman had published the full
+account of the Sutlej case, for we would then have many interesting
+comparisons in his behavior and response to the restorative methods
+used, and the reaction and response of this man buried two thousand
+years to the same methods for restoring suspended animation. The
+Frenchman never arrived with his man. It was all a lie. Yet by
+following Hilsenhoff's solemn injunctions to the letter, we had an
+excuse to leave him as dead, and you insisted that we should do so,
+and I, weak and infatuated with your ripe beauty, I agreed. You said
+that we would leave him in his self-chosen sleep and that he should be
+our lodger. And so he has been and we have never called him to
+breakfast in all these thirty years. We have even brought him to
+America with us and he sleeps. Ah, no, we did not slay him. We but
+obeyed his commands."
+
+"Poor young Hilsenhoff. And I am his wife and he is but thirty years
+old and I am fifty. Heigho!"
+
+"Woman, you will drive me crazy," said the great annotator of the
+Upanishads, and he left for a kommers with the nearest barkeeper.
+
+"As if you did not drive me crazy, you obese, misshapen wine skin! you
+bloated, blue-faced sot!" said the woman. "I deserted young Hilsenhoff
+for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair,
+and he is mine and I am his and I will let him out of the box and we
+will live together in love, the dear young thing. What if he does
+study sometimes? I shall not mind. He need not always sit with me in
+love's dalliance."
+
+All at once it came home to her that if Moehrlein maintained the
+resuscitation of Hilsenhoff was impossible and charged her with
+believing it possible because she wished to believe it so, it might
+also be true that he did not believe it possible because he did not
+wish to so believe. The burned out eyes that told of dreams of men,
+men who these many years had not included her husband, smoldered with
+a sudden fire. With a song in her heart, she was up and bustling
+about. She filled a brazier with coals and got a frying-pan and
+wheat-cake batter, and a razor and a crocheting hook--ah, she knew how
+the process of restoring suspended animation was practised. She
+lumbered up into the third story with her burdens, into the room where
+slept the lodger. Not for fifteen years had anyone looked into that
+sleeping chamber. The blinds and curtains, all were drawn, the dust
+lay thick under foot. She let in the light of day at every window.
+There sat the box in the middle of the floor, hooped with bands of
+iron and with the great seal of the University of Bonn stamped upon
+the lock. She broke the seal and turned the lock and then sank down in
+a sudden faintness of heart. Indeed, how loath she was to put an end
+to the dream that had just now filled her whole being with rapture,
+and what else would it be but to put an end to it when she delved into
+that box? She would go away and let herself dream on a few days more
+before putting the matter to its final test, perhaps never doing so.
+Thus she reasoned, and yet her hand, as she sat before the box with
+averted face, rose as if impelled by the volition of another
+intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the mass of wool and
+wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle,
+through the wrapping, and felt--the thrill of unimaginable joy ran
+through her. It was not bones, it was not bones!
+
+Into the room of the lodger came Dr. August Moehrlein. The coals of
+the brazier were out, the batter had been turned into cakes, the razor
+was covered with hair, four waxen plugs lay by the crocheting hook.
+The process was over. The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his
+delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and
+young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes.
+On the floor before him in an attitude of adoration, knelt the woman
+who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no
+longer, but aflash with youthful passion. But in her eyes alone was
+there youth. Nothing of youthful archness and coquetry was there in
+her gaze, only greed, the sickening fondness of an aging woman for a
+young man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy
+compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe
+beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He
+saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the
+revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly
+soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased
+in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould
+from the moisture of his own body grew thick and green and horrible.
+He gazed at Dr. Moehrlein, the one-time Adonis of Bonn, and he
+shuddered, and which of what he looked at, or whether all, made him do
+so, he could not tell.
+
+Old men like young women, but so do old women hanker after young men.
+The life companion of Moehrlein embraced Hilsenhoff's knees. With
+smirkings and grimacings and leers that started his shudders afresh,
+she told him all. She confessed her crime and abased herself, but now
+they would begin life again, and she croaked forth a string of
+allurements from a throat that had known too many rich puddings. Oh,
+who shall describe her transports! Never before had every fiber of her
+being been so penetrated with joy! A young husband, oh, a young
+husband! By as much as Moehrlein had once surpassed him, did
+Hilsenhoff now surpass Moehrlein a hundred fold. And young, young,
+young! She was like to fall on her face in her ecstasy. The discarded
+and despised Moehrlein stood by and paid, if never before, the price
+of his villainy. There is a contempt of man for man and a contempt of
+woman for woman, but the contempt of woman for man----
+
+One sleeps and is unconscious, but nonetheless by some subtle sense is
+aware of the passage of time, and the thirty years that he had slept,
+pressed upon young Hilsenhoff and his soul yearned to take up life
+again. He looked at the companions of his youth, that youth which was
+still his and had gone from them, and he looked at the place where he
+had lain for a third of a century, thick with damp green mould.
+Outside the song of birds was calling him, the rustle of green leaves
+and the glorious sunlight, the world renewing its life with the warm
+throbs of the year's youth, and putting from him forever his living
+grave and the woman and her paramour, he rushed into the joyous
+springtide.
+
+Now why, my friend, descend into the hell of repinings and rage and
+heart-gnawings of that woman he left behind? Or why tell of the misery
+of the learned Dr. Moehrlein? She has no comfort whatsoever, but the
+doctor has the solace of his kommers, so let us wish that his beer may
+be forever flat, his wieners mildewy, and the mustard mouldy like the
+horrible nest of young Hilsenhoff.
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Seventh Gift of the Emir._
+
+
+"I did not know that such things were possible," said Mr. Middleton,
+when Prince Achmed had concluded the tale of the episode of the two
+Orientalists and the faithless woman. "Do I understand that the person
+in this condition is asleep?"
+
+"It is not consistent with strict scientific accuracy to say the
+person is asleep," said the emir; "for the vital processes are
+entirely in abeyance and the subject is devoid of any evidence of
+life. The pulse is still, for the heart no longer beats and all the
+blood having retreated to that inmost citadel of the body, the skin
+has the pallor of death. Only in a little spot upon the crown is there
+any sign of life. Here is a place warm to the touch and the first and
+most important operation in restoring the suspended animation, is to
+send this vital warmth forth from where it still feebly simmers,
+coursing once more through the body's shrunken channels. This is
+accomplished by shaving the crown and applying thereto a succession of
+piping hot pancakes. The tongue has been curved back over the entrance
+to the throat. You reach into the mouth and with a finger pull the
+tongue back into place. Plugs of wax in the nostrils and ears are
+removed, and in a very short time the subject is as well as ever."
+
+"It is very interesting," murmured Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Since you find it so, let me present you with a little treatise upon
+the subject written by a Mohammedan hakim, or doctor of medicine,
+after studying several cases of the kind at Madras, which is in
+India," and at his bidding, Mesrour brought him a small portable
+writing desk from which he took a manuscript scroll inscribed in the
+Arabic language. "The first page," said Prince Achmed, "contains a few
+thoughts upon the superiority of the Moslem faith over all others and
+a discussion of the follies, inconsistencies, not to say evils of them
+all when compared with that perfect religious system declared to men
+by the Prophet of Mecca," and having in an orotund voice given Mr.
+Middleton some idea of the contents of this page by quoting a number
+of sentences, the prince handed him the sheet, which was inscribed
+upon one side only. The emir continuing to give a summary of what the
+hakim set forth in the remaining pages, and handing over each sheet as
+he finished it, Mr. Middleton wrote in short-hand upon the blank side
+of each preceding sheet what the emir culled from the one following,
+omitting, of course, the contents of the first sheet, both because he
+had nothing to write upon while the emir was quoting from that one,
+and because its theology was entirely contrary to all Mr. Middleton
+held, and, in his eyes, ridiculous and sacrilegious. When the emir had
+done, Mr. Middleton had in his possession a succinct account of the
+process of inducing a condition of suspended animation and of the
+means of restoring the subject to his normal state. It was his
+intention to write an article from his notes for some Sunday paper,
+and putting the hakim's treatise in his pocket, and thanking his host
+for the entertainment and instruction as well as the gift, he sought
+his lodgings.
+
+Mr. Middleton had now been admitted to the bar for some time. But the
+firm of Brockelsby and Brockman did not therefore raise his salary.
+They made greater demands upon his endeavors than before, for he was
+now able to handle cases in court, but they did not raise his salary,
+nor did they employ him upon cases where he was able to distinguish
+himself, or learn new points of law and gain forensic ability. He was
+employed upon humdrum and commonplace cases that were a vexation to
+his spirit without any compensating advantage of pecuniary reward or
+experience. While he felt that his self-respect and on one hand his
+self-interests impelled him to resign his connection with Brockelsby
+and Brockman, on the other hand, the very course his employers pursued
+made such retirement temporarily inexpedient. For the trivial cases he
+handled could neither gain him reputation enough or make him friends
+enough to warrant him in setting up for himself, nor would they
+attract the attention of other firms and result in offers at an
+increased salary. He was in a measure forced to remain with Brockelsby
+and Brockman, hoping they would be moved to pay him according to his
+worth and dreaming of some contingency which might place in his hands
+the management of an important case with the resulting enhancing of
+his reputation.
+
+On the morning after he had received the dissertation of the hakim,
+Mr. Middleton arose with the first streak of dawn, minded to seek the
+office and write his projected article before the time for his regular
+duties should arrive. As he opened the door of the main office, his
+ear was saluted by a low grunting sound, and there in evening dress
+was Mr. Augustus Alfonso Brockelsby, reclining in a big chair, asleep,
+if one could with propriety call the stupor in which he was sunk,
+sleep. The disorder of his garments, the character of his
+sternutations, the redness of his face, and above all, the odor he
+distilled upon the chill morning air, made patent to Mr. Middleton the
+disgusting fact that the senior member of the firm was drunk. On the
+table before the unconscious man was a note from Mr. Brockman
+informing him that he had been unexpectedly called to Lansing,
+Michigan, and would not be back for a week and that therefore he,
+Brockelsby, would have to attend to the important case of Ralston
+versus Hippenmeyer, all by himself. Mr. Middleton at once set about
+bringing his employer into a condition where he could attend to his
+affairs, for the case of Ralston versus Hippenmeyer was a very
+important one indeed, and as Mr. Middleton had briefed the case
+himself and had his sympathies greatly excited for Johannes
+Hippenmeyer, he was very anxious that their client should not lose for
+default of any effort he could make. But his heart was heavy as he
+brought towels and a basin of cold water from the wash-room, for after
+he had done his very best, Brockelsby would still be far from the
+proper form, his brain befogged, his speech thick, and the counsel for
+the other side would make short work of him.
+
+Mr. Middleton had never tried to sober a drunken man, but he had an
+indistinct recollection of hearing that a towel wet with cold water,
+wrapped around the head was the best remedial agent. As he soaked the
+towels, he could not but compare the difference between this chill
+restorative and the hot cakes in the tale of the emir, and on a sudden
+there came to him a thought that sent all the gloom from his face. He
+dropped the towels, he dropped the basin, and he opened the treatise
+of the hakim and feverishly refreshed his memory of the details of an
+operation sometimes practised in India.
+
+An hour and a half had passed when Mr. Middleton finished. Mr.
+Augustus Brockelsby still sat in the revolving chair, but he was no
+longer disturbing the air with his unseemly grunts. He was, in fact,
+absolutely silent, absolutely still. The keenest touch could feel no
+pulsation in his wrist, the keenest eye could detect no agitation of
+his chest, the keenest ear could hear no beating from the region of
+the heart. For a moment as he gazed upon the result of following the
+instructions set down by the hakim, Mr. Middleton felt a little clutch
+of fear. But he was reassured by the lifelike appearance of the
+learned jurisconsult and by the fact that the induction into his
+present state had been attended by none of the manifestations that
+accompany death.
+
+"Now," said Mr. Middleton, addressing the unconscious form of Augustus
+Brockelsby, "now there will be no chance of you appearing in court in
+the case of Ralston versus Hippenmeyer. I will not restore you until
+it is all over. I will now have the long coveted opportunity to plead
+an important case and as I have studied it so carefully, I shall win.
+There will now be no chance that poor little Hippenmeyer will suffer
+from your disgraceful and bestial habits, for in spite of the best
+that could be done for you, you would be in no fit condition to plead
+a case this afternoon. And when I bring you to at fall of night, you
+will think you have been drunk all day. But where will I keep you in
+the meantime?"
+
+This was a most perplexing problem. There were no closets in the suite
+of offices. There were no boxes, no desks big enough to conceal a man
+and Mr. Middleton's brow was beginning to contract as he struggled
+with the problem, when suddenly the stillness of the room was
+disturbed by some one smiting the door. Not a sound made he, for his
+heart had stopped beating as completely as Brockelsby's. What should
+he do, what should he do? The paralysis of fear answered for him and
+supplied the best present plan and he did nothing. Then came a voice,
+a voice calling him by name, the voice of Chauncy Stackelberg.
+
+"Open up, old man, open up. I know you are there, for I heard you
+knocking around before I rapped and you dropped your handkerchief
+outside the door. Open up, or I'll shin right over the transom, for I
+must see you," and still preserving silence, Mr. Middleton heard a
+sound as of a man essaying to stand on the door knob and grasp the
+transom above. He rushed to the door, unlocked it, and opening it just
+enough to squeeze through, shut it behind him and thrust the key in
+the lock.
+
+"Keep still, keep still. You'll wake the old man. I can't let you in."
+
+"Was that him, slumped down in the chair? Must be tired to sleep in
+that position. Say, old chap, you were my best man, and now I want you
+again."
+
+"Want me to draw up papers for a divorce?" said Mr. Middleton,
+gloomily. How was he going to get rid of this inopportune fellow?
+
+"Shut up," said Chauncy Stackelberg. "It's a boy, and I want you to
+come up to the christening next Sunday and be godfather. You don't
+know how happy I am. Say, come on down and get a drink."
+
+Ten minutes before, Mr. Middleton had been convinced that drink was a
+very great curse, but he accepted this invitation with alacrity,
+naming a saloon two blocks away as the one he considered best in that
+vicinity. He surmised that the happy father would hardly offer to come
+back with him from such a distance, and the surmise was correct. As he
+reascended to the office, with him in the elevator were two gentlemen,
+one of whom he recognized as Dr. Angus McAllyn, a celebrated surgeon
+who had two or three times come to the office to see Mr. Brockelsby
+and the other as Dr. Lucius Darst, a young eye and ear specialist who
+within the space of but a few days had established his office in the
+building. To neither of these gentlemen, however, was Mr. Middleton
+known.
+
+"I want you to get off on this floor with me," said Dr. McAllyn to his
+medical confrere. "I may want your assistance a bit. You see," he went
+on, as they got out of the elevator and started down the corridor with
+Mr. Middleton just behind, "we had a banquet last night of the Society
+of Andrew Jackson's Wars, and my friend Brockelsby got too much
+aboard. He was turned over to me to take to his home, but just as we
+were leaving, I received an urgent call. So the best I could do was to
+drive by here and start him toward his office and go on. He could
+navigate after a fashion and doubtless spent the night all right in
+his office, and I would take no farther trouble with him but for the
+fact that he has an important case to-day. So I want to fix him up,
+and as I haven't much time, you can be of service to me."
+
+"Ah, ha," said Mr. Middleton to himself, "I'll just lie low until they
+have given up trying to get in and have gone."
+
+But they did not go away. To his consternation, they opened the door
+and walked in, for though he had put the key in the lock when he had
+closed the door behind him to parley with Chauncy Stackelberg, he had
+walked away without turning it! They would find Mr. Brockelsby! Great
+though Dr. McAllyn was, he would hardly be likely to recognize a
+condition of suspended animation. Unless Mr. Middleton confessed,
+there was danger that the famous forensic orator would be buried
+alive. And if he confessed, what would the consequences be to himself?
+The fact that in whatever event he would lose his place and be a
+marked and disgraced man, was the very least thing to consider. He was
+threatened with far more serious dangers than that. First, there would
+be the vengeance the law would take upon him for meddling with and
+tampering with medical matters. But even if he had been a physician,
+would the medical faculty look otherwise than with horror upon this
+rash and wanton experimenting with the strange and unholy practices of
+India? Even a medical man would be arrested for malpractice and for
+depriving a fellow being of the use of his faculties. The penitentiary
+stared him in the face.
+
+He could not endure not to know what was taking place within. He must
+have knowledge of everything in order to know what moves to make and
+when to make them. He let himself through the outer door of Mr.
+Brockman's private office, and by taking a position by the door
+communicating between this office and the main office, he could hear
+everything in safety.
+
+"Shall I send for an undertaker?" asked Dr. Darst.
+
+At these chilling words, Mr. Middleton was about to open the private
+office door and rush in and confess all. He had begun to place the key
+in the lock, when a joyful thought stayed his hand. Let them bury Mr.
+Brockelsby. He would dig him up. He laughed noiselessly in his intense
+relief. But hark, what does he hear?
+
+"Darst, this is an unusual case."
+
+"Yes?" said Dr. Darst mildly.
+
+"A strange, a remarkable case. Darst, if we do not examine this case,
+we are traitors to science. Darst, we must take him to the medical
+school. When we are through, we'll sew him all again and bring him
+back here, or leave him almost any place where he can be found easily.
+He will be just as good to bury then as now, nobody hurt, and the
+cause of science advanced. Observe, Darst, dead, absolutely dead, yet
+with no rigor mortis. Dead, and yet as if he slept. If need be, we
+will pursue to the inmost recesses of his being the secret of his
+demise."
+
+Mr. Middleton was nigh to falling to the floor. The succession of hope
+and fear had taken from him all resolution. Of what use would it be to
+exhume Mr. Brockelsby after the doctors had cut him up? The impulse to
+rush in and confess had spent itself and he was now cravenly drifting
+with the tide. All judgment, all power of reflection had departed from
+him. He was now only a pitiable wretch with scarcely strength to stand
+by the door and listen, unable to originate any thought, any action.
+
+"How are you going to get him out of here?" asked Dr. Darst.
+
+"In a box. You don't suppose I'd carry him down and put him in a
+hack?"
+
+"But suppose they get to looking for him? It is known that he came
+here. A box goes out of here to be taken to the medical school, a long
+box that might hold a man. You and I are the ones who hire the men who
+carry the box."
+
+"Who said a long box that might hold a man? It will be a short, rather
+tall box, packing-case shape. Remember, he is as limber as you are and
+can be accommodated to any position. He will be put in it sitting bolt
+upright. It will be only half the length of a man, with nothing in its
+shape to suggest that it might hold a man. Who said take it to the
+medical school from here? I hire a drayman to take a box to the Union
+Depot. He dumps it there on the sidewalk near the places for in-going
+and out-going baggage. Ostensibly going to carry it as excess baggage.
+We fiddle around until he goes, then call up some other drayman in the
+crowd hanging about and take a box just arrived from Milwaukee, St.
+Paul, any place the drayman wants to think, out to the college. As for
+the inquiry that will be made concerning the whereabouts of
+Brockelsby, rest easy on that point. He frequently goes off on sprees
+of several days' duration and his absence from home is of such common
+occurrence that his wife won't begin to hunt him up until we are
+through with him and have got him back here, or have dumped him in
+front of some building with his neck broken, showing that he fell out
+of some story above."
+
+All this Mr. Middleton heard as he leaned against the door jamb,
+swallowing, swallowing, with never a thing in his mouth since the
+night before, yet swallowing. He heard Dr. Darst go after a box. He
+heard men deposit it in the corridor outside. He heard the two doctors
+take it in when the men had gone. He heard it go heavily out into the
+corridor again after a long interval. He heard more men come, come to
+carry it away, and he pulled himself together with a supreme effort
+and followed. He saw the box loaded on a dray. With his eye constantly
+on it, he threaded his way through the crowd on the sidewalk, followed
+it on its way across the river to the Union Depot. With never a hope
+in his heart that anything could possibly occur to save him from a
+final confession and its consequences, humanlike postponing the evil
+hour as long as he could.
+
+The box was dumped upon the sidewalk before the depot. The two medical
+men stood leaning upon it, waiting for the drayman to depart. The evil
+moment had arrived. Once away from the depot, in the less congested
+streets in the direction of the medical college, the dray would go too
+fast for him to follow. He approached. He must speak now. No, no. He
+need not follow the dray. That was not necessary. He could get to the
+medical school before they could have time to do injury to Mr.
+Brockelsby. It would be safe to let the box get out of his sight for
+that little time. He would tell at the medical college.
+
+"Yes, as soon as we get him there," said Dr. McAllyn, "we'll put him
+in the pickle."
+
+Mr. Middleton sprang forward and put an appealing hand upon the
+shoulder of either doctor. With a sudden start that caused him to
+start in turn, each wheeled about. For a moment, he could say nothing
+and stood with palsied lips while they gave back his stare. Gave back
+his stare? All at once his mouth came open and these were the words he
+heard issue forth:
+
+"Sirs, I arrest you for stealing the body of Mr. Augustus Alfonso
+Brockelsby, attorney-at-law."
+
+He who had just now been an abject, grovelling wretch, was of a sudden
+come to be a lord among men. The practitioners making no reply, he
+continued:
+
+"Are you going to be sensible enough to make no trouble, or shall I
+have to call yonder officer?"
+
+Mr. Middleton considered this quite a master stroke. By the assumption
+of a pretended authority over the neighboring policeman he would
+forestall any possibility of resistance and question as to what
+authority he represented. But he need have had no fears on this score.
+The doctors were too alarmed to do otherwise than submit to his
+pleasure, too thoroughly convinced that none but a detective could
+have had knowledge of the contents of the box. But Dr. McAllyn did
+attach a significance to what Mr. Middleton had said, a significance
+natural to one so well acquainted with the devious ways of the great
+city as he was.
+
+"Well," he said, with a sardonic smile, "you needn't call in help. We
+stand pat. How much is it going to cost us?"
+
+Then did Mr. Middleton perceive he was delivered from a dilemma, a
+dilemma unforeseen, but which even if foreseen, he could not have
+forearmed against. After he had arrested the doctors, how would he
+have disposed of them and the box containing Mr. Brockelsby? How could
+he have released the doctors and carried off the box in a manner that
+would not excite their suspicions? If he had, in pretended leniency
+and soft-heartedness told them they were free, the absence of any
+apparent motive for this action would have instantly caused them to
+suspect that for some unknown and probably unrighteous reason, he
+desired possession of the body of Mr. Brockelsby and thus would ensue
+a series of complications that would make the ruse of the arrest but a
+leap from the frying pan into the fire. But now Dr. McAllyn had
+supplied the motive.
+
+"Sirs," said Mr. Middleton, with an air of virtue that was well suited
+to the character of the sentiments he now began to enunciate, "you
+deserve punishment. You have been taken in the act of committing a
+crime that is particularly revolting,--stealing a corpse. Dr. McAllyn,
+you have been apprehended in foul treason against friendship. You have
+stolen the body of a comrade. You have meditated cruel and shocking
+mutilation of this body, giving to the horror-stricken eyes of the
+frantic widow the mangled and defaced flesh that was once the goodly
+person of her husband, leaving her to waste her life in vain and
+terrible speculations as to where and how he encountered this awful
+death with its so dreadful wounds."
+
+"It was for the sake of science," interpolated Dr. McAllyn, in no
+little indignation. "If from the insensible clay of the dead we may
+learn that which will save suffering and prolong existence for the
+living, well may we disregard the ancient and ridiculous sentiment
+regarding corpses, a relic of the ancient heathen days when it was
+believed that this selfsame body of this life was worn again in
+another world."
+
+"I will not engage in an antiquarian discussion with you, sir, as to
+the origin of this sentiment. Suffice to say it exists and is one of
+the most powerful sentiments that rules mankind. You have attempted to
+violate it, to outrage it. However you may look upon your action, the
+penitentiary awaits you. Yet one can well hesitate to pronounce the
+word that condemns a fellow man to that living death. It is not the
+mere punishment itself. The dragging years will pass, but what will
+you be when they have passed? We no longer brand the persons of
+convicts, but none the less does the iron sear their souls and none
+the less does the world see with its mind's eye the scorched word
+'convict' on their brows, so long as they live. In the capacity of
+judge, were I one, I might use such limit of discretion as the law
+allows in making your punishment lighter or heavier, but the disgrace
+of it, no one can mitigate. Therefore, that you may receive some
+measure of the punishment you deserve, and yet not be blasted for
+life, I will accept a monetary consideration and set you free."
+
+"Oh, you will, will you?" said Dr. McAllyn. "How much lighter or
+heavier will you in your capacity as judge make this impost?"
+
+"I will not take my time in replying to your slurs in kind. You, Dr.
+McAllyn, as the one primarily responsible, as the leader who induced
+Dr. Darst to enter this conspiracy, as the one most to be reproached,
+in that Mr. Brockelsby was your friend, as the one by far the most
+able to pay, you shall pay $1,200. Dr. Darst shall pay $200. This is a
+punishment by no means commensurate with your crime. By this forfeit,
+shall you escape prison and disgrace."
+
+"Of course you know that I have no such sum as that about me," said
+Dr. McAllyn. "I will write you a check."
+
+"I am not so green as I look," said Mr. Middleton, assuming an easy
+sitting posture upon the box containing the mortal envelope of Mr.
+Brockelsby. "You may dispatch Dr. Darst with a check to get the money
+for you and himself. You will remain here as a hostage until his
+return."
+
+Accordingly, Dr. Darst departed and Mr. Middleton sat engrossed in
+reflection upon the chain of unpleasant circumstances that had forced
+upon him the unavoidable and distasteful role of a bribe-taker. Yet
+how else could he have carried off the part he had assumed? How else
+could he have obtained custody of Mr. Brockelsby? And surely the
+doctors richly deserved punishment. It was not meet that they should
+go scot free and in no other way could he bring it about that
+retribution should be visited upon them.
+
+"It is all here," said Mr. Middleton, when he had counted the bills
+brought by Dr. Darst. "I shall now see that Mr. Brockelsby is taken
+back to the office whence you took him."
+
+"Pardon me," said Dr. Darst, "how in the world did you know we took
+him from his office? How did you ferret it all out?"
+
+"I cannot tell you that," said Mr. Middleton. "I shall take him back
+to the office. He will be found there later in the day, just as you
+found him. You are wise enough to make no inquiries concerning him, to
+watch for no news of developments. Indeed, to make in some measure an
+alibi, should it be needed, you had better leave town by next train
+for the rest of the day. If it were known you were with Mr. Brockelsby
+at any time, might it not be thought that you were responsible for the
+condition he was found in?"
+
+The doctors boarded the very next train, and Mr. Middleton, serene in
+the knowledge that no one would disturb him now, had the box taken
+back and set up in the main office. A slight thump in the box as it
+was ended up against the wall, caused Mr. Middleton to believe that
+Mr. Brockelsby was now resting on his head, but he resolved to allow
+this unavoidable circumstance to occasion him no disquiet. Going to a
+large department store where a sale of portieres was in progress, he
+purchased some portieres and a number of other things. The portieres
+he draped over the box, concealing its bare pine with shimmering
+cardinal velvet and turning it into the semblance of a cabinet. Lest
+any inquisitive hand tear it away, he placed six volumes of Chitty and
+a bust of Daniel Webster upon the top and tacked two photographs of
+Mr. Brockelsby upon the front. Confident that no one would disturb the
+receptacle containing his employer, he went into court and after a
+short but exceedingly spirited legal battle in which he displayed a
+forensic ability, a legal lore, and a polished eloquence which few of
+the older members of the Chicago bar could have equalled, he won a
+signal victory.
+
+Although it was not his intention to set about restoring Mr.
+Brockelsby until an hour that would ensure him against likelihood of
+interruption, he returned to the office to see if by any untoward
+mischance anybody could have interfered with the box. To his surprise,
+he found Mrs. Brockelsby seated before that object of vertu with her
+eye straying abstractedly over the cardinal portieres, the photographs
+of Mr. Brockelsby, the bust of Daniel Webster, and the volumes of
+Chitty.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Middleton," exclaimed the lady. "Mr. Brockelsby did not come
+home to-day and they tell me he wasn't in court."
+
+"No, he was not in court," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Oh, where, oh, where can he be!" moaned Mrs. Brockelsby.
+
+Mr. Middleton being of the opinion that this question was merely
+exclamatory, ejaculatory in its nature, of the kind orators employ to
+garnish and embellish their discourse and which all books of rhetoric
+state do not expect or require an answer, accordingly made no answer.
+He was, nevertheless, somewhat disturbed by the poor lady's grief and
+wished that it were possible to restore her husband to her instantly.
+
+"Oh, I have wanted to see him so, I have wanted him so! Oh, where can
+he be, Mr. Middleton! I must find him. I cannot endure it longer. I
+will offer a reward to anyone who will bring him home within
+twenty-four hours, to anyone who will find him. Oh, oh, oh, oh! I will
+give $200. I will give it to you, yourself, if you will find him.
+Write a notice to that effect and take it to the newspaper offices."
+
+This great distress on the part of the lady was all contrary to what
+Dr. McAllyn had said concerning her indifference to the absence of her
+spouse and caused Mr. Middleton to feel very much like a guilty
+wretch. As he wrote out the notices for the papers, he reiterated
+assurances that Mr. Brockelsby would turn up before morning, while the
+partner of the missing barrister continued her heartbroken wailing and
+the cause of it all was driven well-nigh wild.
+
+"Oh, if you only knew!" she said, as Mr. Middleton was about to depart
+for the newspaper offices. "Day after to-morrow, I am going to
+Washington to attend a meeting of the Federation of Woman's Clubs.
+That odious Mrs. LeBaron is going to spring a diamond necklace worth
+two thousand dollars more than mine. Augustus must come home in time
+to sign a check so I can put three thousand dollars more into mine."
+
+A great load soared from Mr. Middleton's mind and blithe joy reigned
+there instead.
+
+"Mrs. Brockelsby, I'll leave no stone unturned. I'll bring you your
+husband before breakfast," and escorting the lady to her carriage and
+handing her in with the greatest deference and most courtly gallantry,
+he set forth for one of the more famous of the large restaurants which
+are household words among the elite of Chicago. Mr. Middleton had
+never passed its portals, but with fourteen hundred dollars in his
+pocket and two hundred more in sight, he felt he could afford to give
+himself a good meal and break the fast he had kept since the evening
+before, for in the crowded events of the day, he had found time to
+refresh himself with nothing more substantial than an apple and a bag
+of peanuts, or fruit of the Arachis hypogea.
+
+As he sat down at a table in the glittering salle-a-manger, what was
+his great surprise and even greater delight, to see seated opposite,
+just slowly finishing his dessert--a small bowl of sherbet--habited in
+a perfectly-fitting frock coat with a red carnation in the lapel, the
+urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having
+exchanged mutual expressions of pleasure at this unexpected encounter,
+Mr. Middleton, overjoyed and elated at the successes of the day, began
+to pour into the ears of the prince a relation of the events that had
+resulted from the gift of the treatise of the learned hakim of Madras,
+which is in India. He told everything from the beginning to the end.
+
+"In the morning," he said in conclusion, "I take Mr. Brockelsby home
+in a cab and get the two hundred dollars."
+
+"Alas, alas!" said Achmed mournfully, his great liquid brown eyes
+resting sorrowfully upon Mr. Middleton. "What a corrupting effect the
+haste to get rich has upon American youth. My friend, it cannot be
+that you intend to take the two hundred dollars?"
+
+"But I find old Brock, don't I?'
+
+"That is precisely what you do not do. You know where he is. You put
+him there. How can you say you found him?"
+
+"All right, I won't do it," said Mr. Middleton, abashed at Achmed's
+reproof, a reproof his conscience told him was eminently deserved.
+
+"I thank Allah," said the prince, "that I am an Arab and not an
+American. The fortunes of my line, its glories, were not won in the
+vulgar pursuits of trade, in the chicanery of business, in the shady
+paths of speculation, in the questionable manipulation of stocks and
+bonds. It was not thus that the ancient houses of the nobility of
+Europe and the Orient built up their honorable fortunes. Never did the
+men of my house parley with their consciences, never did they strike a
+truce with their knightly instincts in order to gain gold. Ah, no,
+no," mused the prince, looking pensively up at the gaily decorated
+ceiling as he reflected upon the glories of his line; "it was in the
+noble profession of arms, the illustrious practice of warfare that we
+won our honorable possessions. At the sacking of Medina, the third
+prince of our house gained a goodly treasure of gold and precious
+stones, and founded our fortune. In warfare with the Wahabees, we
+acquired countless herds and the territories for them to roam upon. By
+descents across the Red Sea into the realms of the Abyssinians, we
+took hundreds of slaves. From the Dey of Aden we acquired one hundred
+thousand sequins as the price of peace. In the sacking of the cities
+of Hedjaz and Yemen and even the dominions of Oman, did we gallantly
+gain in the perilous and honorable pursuit of war further store of
+treasure. Ah, those were brave days, those days of old, those knightly
+days of old! Faugh, I am out of tune with this vile commercial country
+and this vile commercial age."
+
+The prince arose as he uttered these last words and in his rhapsody
+forgetting the presence of Mr. Middleton, without a farewell he
+stalked through the great apartment, absentmindedly, though gracefully
+twirling a pair of pearl gray gloves in the long sensitive fingers of
+his left hand. A little hush fell upon the brilliant assemblage and
+many a bright eye dwelt admiringly upon the elegant person, so
+elegantly attired, of the urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe
+of Al-Yam.
+
+For some time Mr. Middleton sat plunged in abstraction, toying with
+the three kinds of dessert he had ordered, as he meditated upon the
+words of the emir. At last rousing himself, he had finished the
+marrons glacees and was about to begin upon a Nesselrode pudding, when
+he heard himself addressed, and looking up saw before him a young
+woman of an exceedingly prepossessing appearance. She was richly
+dressed with a quiet elegance that bespoke her a person of good taste.
+Laughing, roguish eyes illuminated a piquant face in which were to be
+seen good sense, ingenuousness and kindness, mingled with
+self-reliance and determination. Mr. Middleton knew not whether to
+admire her most for the beautiful proportions of her figure, the
+loveliness of her face, or the fine mental qualities of which her
+countenance gave evidence. With a delightful frankness in which there
+was no hint of real or pretended embarrassment, she said:
+
+"Pray pardon this intrusion on the part of a total stranger. I have
+particular reasons for desiring to know the name and station of the
+gentleman who left you a short time ago, and knowing no one else to
+ask, have resolved to throw myself upon your good nature. I will ask
+of you not to require the reasons of me, assuring you that they are
+perhaps not entirely unconnected with the welfare of this gentleman. I
+observed from your manner toward one another that you were
+acquaintances and that it was no chance conversation between
+strangers. He is, I take it, an Italian."
+
+Without pausing to reflect that the emir might not be at all pleased
+to have this young woman know of his identity, Mr. Middleton exclaimed
+hastily and with a gesture of expostulation:
+
+"Oh, no! He is not a Dago," and then after a pause he remarked
+impressively, "He is an Arab," and then after a still longer pause, he
+said still more impressively, "He is the Emir Achmed Ben Daoud,
+hereditary prince of the tribe of Al-Yam, which ranges on the borders
+of that fertile and smiling region of Arabia known as Yemen, or Arabia
+the Happy."
+
+"He is not a Dago!" said the young woman, clasping her hands with
+delighted fervor.
+
+"He is not a Dago!" said another voice, and Mr. Middleton became aware
+that at his back stood a second young woman scarcely less charming
+than the first. "He is not a Dago!" she repeated, scarcely less
+delighted than the first.
+
+Mr. Middleton arose and assumed an attitude which was at once
+indicative of proper deference toward his fair questioners and enabled
+him the better to feast his entranced eyes upon them. Moreover, on all
+sides he observed that people were looking at them and he needed no
+one to tell him that his conversation with these two daughters of the
+aristocracy was causing the assemblage to regard him as an individual
+of social importance. He gave the emir's address upon Clark Street and
+after dwelling some time upon his graces of person and mind, related
+how it was that this Eastern potentate was resident in the city of
+Chicago in a comparatively humble capacity.
+
+"His brother is shut up in a vermillion tower."
+
+"Vermillion, did you say?" breathlessly asked the first young lady.
+
+"Oh, how romantic!" exclaimed the second young lady. "A tower of
+vermillion! Is he good looking, like this one? Do you suppose he will
+come here? Oh, Mildred, I must meet him. And the imam of Oman is going
+to give the vermillion tower to the brother, when he is released. We
+could send one of papa's whalebacks after it. What a lovely house on
+Prairie Avenue it would make. 'The Towers,' we would call it. No,
+'Vermillion Towers.' How lovely it would sound on a card, 'Wednesdays,
+Vermillion Towers.' We must get him out. Can't we do it?"
+
+"If it were in this country," said Mr. Middleton, "I would engage to
+get him out. I would secure a writ of habeas corpus, or devise other
+means to speedily release him. But unfortunately, I am not admitted to
+practice in the dominions of Oman. But I do not pity the young man.
+One could well be willing to suffer incarceration in a tower of
+vermillion, if he knew he were an object of solicitude to one so fair
+as yourself. One could wear the gyves and shackles of the most
+terrible tyranny almost in happiness, if he knew that such lovely eyes
+grew moist over his fate and such beauteous lips trembled when they
+told the tale of his imprisonment."
+
+Now such gallant speeches were all very well in the days of
+knee-breeches and periwigs, but in this age and in Chicago, they are
+an anachronism and the two young ladies started as if they had
+suddenly observed that Mr. Middleton had on a low-cut vest, or his
+trousers were two years behind the times, and somewhat curtly and
+coolly making their adieus, they sailed rapidly away, leaving Mr.
+Middleton--who was not the most obtuse mortal in the world--to
+savagely fill with large pieces of banana pie the orifice whence had
+lately issued the words which had cut short his colloquy with the two
+beauties. He deeply regretted that in his association with Prince
+Achmed he had fallen into a flowery and Oriental manner of speech and
+resolved henceforth to eschew such fashion of discourse.
+
+The clocks were solemnly tolling the hour of midnight when Mr.
+Augustus Alfonso Brockelsby rubbed his eyes and sat up in the
+revolving chair in the main office of his suite. Mr. Middleton was
+standing near, hastily putting away a razor. A warm odor lay on the
+still air of the room.
+
+"Hello, isn't it daylight yet?" asked Mr. Brockelsby. The hot cakes
+that had but lately been applied to his shaven crown, seemed to have
+dispelled the fogs of intoxication and he was master of himself.
+
+"It is twelve o'clock," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Twelve! Why, it was three when I left the banquet table. Twelve!"
+
+"Twelve," said Mr. Middleton, pointing gravely to the clock on the
+desk.
+
+"It--is--twelve. Don't tell me it is the day after."
+
+"I am compelled to do so. You were at the banquet of the Sons of
+Andrew Jackson's Wars, twenty-four hours ago."
+
+"Great Scott!" exclaimed Mr. Brockelsby, thrusting his hands through
+his hair, or rather making the motion of doing so. "Great Scott!" he
+repeated, "I am bald-headed. What the devil have I been into? Where
+the devil have I been?"
+
+"I found you here this morning. Your wife has been here."
+
+"Oh, lord! Oh, lord! What did she say when she saw me dead to the
+world--and bald-headed?"
+
+"She did not see you. I had concealed you."
+
+"Good boy, good boy."
+
+"She offered me two hundred dollars reward to bring you home," and Mr.
+Middleton related all that Mrs. Brockelsby had said.
+
+"It would be all off when she saw me bald-headed. What the devil
+wouldn't she suspect? I don't know. I would say I didn't know where I
+had been. That would certainly sound fishy. It would sound like a
+preposterous excuse to cover up something pretty questionable. People
+don't go out in good society and get their heads shaved. She's pretty
+independent and uppish now. She said the next time she knew of me
+cutting up any didoes, she would get a divorce. She comes into two
+hundred thousand from her grandfather's estate in six months and she's
+pretty independent. Say, my boy, can't you take a check for the money
+she wants? She's going to Washington to-morrow. Tell her I went out of
+town and sent the money. I _will_ go out of town. But the boys will
+see my bald head. Where do you suppose I was? What sort of crowd was I
+with? I must have a wig. You must get it for me. The boys would josh
+me to death, and if the story got to my wife it would be all off. I'll
+go to Battle Creek and get a new lot of hair started."
+
+Mr. Middleton sat down and wrote busily for a moment. He handed a
+sheet of paper to Mr. Brockelsby.
+
+"What's this? You resign? You're not going to help me out?"
+
+"I am no longer in your employ. I will undertake to do all you ask of
+me for a proper compensation, say one hundred and fifty a day for two
+days."
+
+"What?" screamed Mr. Brockelsby. "This is robbery, extortion,
+blackmail."
+
+"It is what you often charge yourself. Very well. Get your own wig and
+be seen on the streets going after it. Leave your wife to wonder why I
+do not come to report what progress is made in the search for you and
+to start a rigorous investigation herself. I am under no obligations
+not to ease her worry, to calm her disturbed mind by telling her I
+have found you. She'll be hot foot after you then."
+
+"She'd spot the wig at once. It would fool others, but not her. She'd
+see I had been jagged. You've got me foul. I'll have to accede to your
+terms. You'll not give me away?"
+
+"Sir, I would not, in this, my first employment as an independent
+attorney, be so derelict to professional honor, as to betray the
+secrets of my client. We have chosen to call this three hundred
+dollars--a check for which you will give me in advance--payment for
+the services I am about to perform. In reality, I consider it only
+part of what you owe for the miserably underpaid services of the past
+three years."
+
+As Mr. Middleton wended his way homeward, it was with some melancholy
+that he recalled how, on previous occasions when good fortune had
+added to his stock of wealth, he had rejoiced in it because he saw his
+dreams of marriage with the young lady of Englewood approaching
+realization more and more. But now they had drifted apart. Not once
+had he seen her since that fatal night. On several evenings he had
+made the journey to Englewood and walked up and down before her house,
+but not so much as her shadow on the curtain had he seen. Let her make
+the first move toward a reconciliation. If she expected him to do so
+after her treatment of him, she was sadly mistaken.
+
+
+
+
+_The Adventure of Achmed Ben Daoud._
+
+
+Being curious to hear of the young ladies who had inquired concerning
+the emir in the restaurant, and to learn what their connection with
+that prince might be, Mr. Middleton repaired to the bazaar on Clark
+Street on the succeeding night. But the emir was not in. Mesrour
+apparently having experienced one of those curious mental lesions not
+unknown in the annals of medicine, where a linguist loses all memory
+of one or more of the languages he speaks, while retaining full
+command of the others--Mesrour having experienced such a lesion, which
+had, at least temporarily, deprived him of his command of the English
+language, Mr. Middleton was unable to learn anything that he desired
+to know, until bethinking himself of the fact that alcohol loosens the
+thought centers and that by its agency Mesrour's atrophied brain cells
+might be stimulated, revivified, and the coma dispelled, he made
+certain signs intelligible to all races of men in every part of the
+world and took the blackamore into a neighboring saloon, where, after
+regaling him with several beers, he learned that only an hour before
+an elegant turnout containing two young women, beautiful as houris,
+had called for the emir and taken him away.
+
+"He done tole me that if I tole anybody whar he was gwine, he'd
+bowstring me and feed mah flesh to the dawgs."
+
+Mr. Middleton shuddered as he heard this threat, so characteristically
+Oriental.
+
+"Where _was_ he going?" he inquired with an air of profound
+indifference and irrelevance, signalling for another bottle of beer.
+
+The blackamore silently drank the beer, a gin fizz, and two Scotch
+high-balls, his countenance the while bearing evidence that he was
+struggling with a recalcitrant memory.
+
+"'Deed, I doan' know, suh," said Mesrour finally. "He never done tole
+me."
+
+Though Mr. Middleton called three times during the next week, he did
+not find the emir in. Nor could Mesrour give any information
+concerning his master's whereabouts. However, in the society news of
+the Sunday papers, appeared at the head of several lists of persons
+attendant upon functions, one A. B. D. Alyam, and this individual was
+included among those at a small dinner given by Misses Mildred and
+Gladys Decatur. As Mildred was the name of one of the young ladies who
+had accosted him in the restaurant, Mr. Middleton felt quite certain
+that this A. B. D. Alyam was none other than Achmed Ben Daoud, emir of
+the tribe of Al-Yam.
+
+On the tenth day, Mesrour informed Mr. Middleton that the emir had
+left word to make an appointment with him for seven o'clock on the
+following evening, at which time Mr. Middleton came, to find the
+accomplished prince sitting at a small desk made in Grand Rapids,
+Michigan, engaged in the composition of a note which he was inscribing
+upon delicate blue stationery with a gold mounted fountain pen.
+Arising somewhat abruptly and offering his hand at an elevation in
+continuity of the extension of his shoulder, the emir begged the
+indulgence of a few moments and resumed his writing. He was arrayed in
+a black frock coat and gray trousers and encircling his brow was a
+moist red line that told of a silk hat but lately doffed. "Give the
+gentleman a cup of tea," said he to Mesrour, looking up from the note,
+which now completed, he was perusing with an air that indicated
+satisfaction with its chirography, orthography, and literary style. At
+last, placing it in an envelope and affixing thereto a seal, he turned
+and ordering Mesrour to give Mr. Middleton another cup of tea, he
+lighted a cigarette and began as follows:
+
+"This is the last time you will see me here. My lease expires
+to-morrow and my experience as a retail merchant, in fact, as any sort
+of merchant, is over. On this, the last evening that we shall meet in
+the old familiar way, the story I have to relate to your indulgent
+ears is of some adventures of my own, adventures which have had their
+final culmination in a manner most delightful to me, and in which
+consummation you have been an agent. Indeed, but for your friendship I
+should not now be the happy man I am. Without further consuming time
+by a preamble which the progress of the tale will render unnecessary,
+I will proceed.
+
+"Last summer, I spent a portion of the heated term at Green Lake,
+Wisconsin. I know that sentiment in this city is somewhat unequally
+divided upon the question of the comparative charms of Green Lake and
+Lake Geneva and that the former resort has not acquired a vogue equal
+to that of the latter, but I must say I greatly prefer Green Lake. I
+have never been at Lake Geneva, it is true, but nevertheless, I prefer
+Green Lake.
+
+"The hotel where I stayed was very well filled and the manager was
+enjoying a highly prosperous season. Yet though there were so many
+people there I made no acquaintances in the first week of my sojourn.
+Nor in the second week did I come to know more than three or four, and
+they but slightly. I was, in truth, treated somewhat as an object of
+suspicion, the cause of which I could not at first imagine. I was
+newer to this country and its customs and costumes there a year ago.
+Previous to starting for the lake, I had purchased of a firm of
+clothiers farther up this street, Poppenheimer and Pappenheimer, a
+full outfit for all occasions and sports incident upon a vacation at a
+fashionable resort. I had not then learned that one can seldom make a
+more fatal mistake than to allow a clothier or tailor to choose for
+you. It is true that these gentry have in stock what persons of
+refinement demand, but they also have fabrics and garments bizarre in
+color and cut, in which they revel and carry for apparently no other
+reason than the delectation of their own perverted taste, since they
+seldom or never sell them. But at times they light upon some one whose
+ignorance or easy-going disposition makes him a prey, and they send
+him forth an example of what they call a well-dressed man. More
+execrably dressed men than Poppenheimer and Pappenheimer and most of
+the other parties in the clothing business, are seldom to be found in
+other walks of life. In my ignorance of American customs, I entrusted
+myself to their hands with the result that my garments were
+exaggerated in pattern and style and altogether unsuited to my dark
+complexion and slim figure. But in the wearing of these garments I
+aggravated the original sartorial offence into a sartorial crime. With
+my golf trousers and white ducks I wore a derby hat. For nearly a week
+I wore with a shirt waist a pair of very broad blue silk suspenders
+embroidered in red. All at once I awoke to a realization that the
+others did not wear their clothes as I did and set myself to imitate
+them with the result that my clothes were at least worn correctly. The
+mischief was largely done, however, before this reform, and nothing I
+could do would alter the cut and fabric.
+
+"My clothes were not the only drawbacks to my making acquaintances. I
+was entirely debarred from a participation in the sports of the place.
+I knew nothing of golf. A son of the desert, I could no more swim than
+fly, and so far from being able to sail a boat, I cannot even manage a
+pair of oars. I could only watch the others indulge in their
+divertissements, a lonely and wistful outsider.
+
+"Yet despite all this, I could perceive that I was not without
+interest to the young ladies. Partially as an object of amusement at
+first, but not entirely that, even at first, for the sympathetic eyes
+of some of them betrayed a gentle compassion.
+
+"Among the twenty or so young ladies at our hotel, were two who would
+attract the attention and excite the admiration of any assemblage, two
+sisters from Chicago, beautiful as houris. In face and figure I have
+never seen their equal. Their cheeks were like the roses of Shiraz,
+their teeth like the pearls of Ormuz, their eyes like the eyes of
+gazelles of Hedjaz. Before beholding these damosels, I had never
+realized what love was, but at last I knew, I fell violently in love
+with them both. Never in my wildest moments had I thought to fall in
+love with a daughter of the Franks. Nor had I contemplated an extended
+stay in this land, and before my departure from Arabia I had begun to
+negotiate for the formation of a harem to be in readiness against my
+return.
+
+"But I soon began to entertain all these thoughts and to dally with
+the idea of changing my religion, abhorrent as that idea was. At first
+I had been comforted by the thought that I was in love with both girls
+in orthodox Moslem style. But reflecting that I could never have both,
+that they would never come to me, that I must go to them, becoming
+renegade to my creed, I tried to decide which I loved best. I came to
+a decision without any extended thinking. I was in love with Miss
+Mildred, the elder of the two sisters Decatur, daughters of one of
+Chicago's wealthy men, and this question settled, there remained the
+stupendous difficulty of winning her. For I did not even possess the
+right to lift my hat to these young ladies. My affair certainly
+appeared quite hopeless.
+
+"In the last week of August, an Italian and his wife encamped upon the
+south shore of the lake with a small menagerie, if a camel, a bear,
+and two monkeys can be dignified by so large a title. He was
+accustomed to make the rounds of the hotels and cottages on alternate
+days, one day mounted on the dromedary and strumming an Oriental lute,
+on the others playing a Basque bagpipe while his bear danced, or
+proceeding with hand-organ and monkeys. He had been a soldier in the
+Italian colony of Massowah on the Red Sea, where he had acquired the
+dromedary--which was the most gigantic one I have ever seen--and a
+smattering of Arabic. English he had none, his wife serving as his
+interpreter in that tongue.
+
+"The sight of the camel was balm to my eyes. Not only was it agreeable
+to me to see one of that race of animals so characteristic of my
+native land, but here at last was a form of recreation opened to me. I
+hired the camel on the days when the Italian was not using him and
+went flying about all over the country. Little did I suspect that I
+thereby became associated with the Italian in the minds of the public
+and that presently they began to believe that I, too, was an Italian
+and the real owner of the menagerie, employing Baldissano to manage it
+for me while I lived at my ease at the hotel. I was heard conversing
+with the Italian, and of course nobody suspected that I was talking to
+him in Arabic. It was a tongue unknown to them all and they chose to
+consider it Italian. Moreover, one Ashton Hanks, a member of the
+Chicago board of trade, at the hotel for the season, had said to the
+menagerie, jerking his thumb interrogatively at me, as I was busied in
+the background with the camel, 'Italiano? Italiano?' To which
+Baldissano replied, 'Si, signor,' meaning 'yes,' thinking of course
+that Hanks meant him. 'Boss? Padrone?' said Hanks again, and again the
+answer was, 'Si, signor.'
+
+"So here I was, made out to be an Italian and the owner of a miserable
+little menagerie which I employed a minion to direct, while myself
+posing as a man of substance and elegant leisure. Here I was, already
+proven a person of atrocious taste in dress, clearly proclaimed of no
+social standing, of unknown and suspicious antecedents, a vulgarian
+pretender and interloper. But of course I didn't know this at the
+time.
+
+"I was riding past the front of the hotel on the camel one day at a
+little before the noon hour, when I beheld her whom I loved overcome
+by keen distress and as she was talking rather loudly, I could not but
+be privy to what she said.
+
+"'Oh, dear,' she exclaimed, clasping her hands in great worriment,
+'what shall I do, what shall I do! Here I am, invited to go on a sail
+and fish-fry on Mr. Gannett's yacht, and I have no white yachting
+shoes to wear with my white yachting dress. I've just got to wear that
+dress, for I brought only two yachting dresses and the blue one is at
+the laundry. I thought I put a pair of white shoes in my trunk, but I
+didn't; I haven't time to send to Ripon for a pair. I won't wear black
+shoes with that dress. But how will I get white ones?'
+
+"'Through my agency,' said I from where I sat on the back of the
+camel.
+
+"'Oh,' said she, with a little start at my unexpected intrusion, her
+face lighting with a sudden hope, nevertheless. 'Were you going to
+Ripon and will you be back before one-thirty? Are you perfectly
+willing to do this errand for me?'
+
+"'I am going to Ripon,' I said, 'and nothing will please me more than
+to execute any commission you may entrust to me. This good steed will
+carry me the six miles and back before it is time to sail. They seldom
+sail on the time set, I have observed.'
+
+"She brought me a patent-leather dancing shoe to indicate the desired
+size, and away I went, secured the shoes, and turned homeward. While
+skirting a large hill that arises athwart the sky to the westward of
+the city of Ripon, I was startled by a weird, portentous, moaning cry
+from my mount. Ah, its import was only too well known to me. Full many
+a time had I heard it in the desert. It was the cry by which the
+camels give warning of the coming of a storm. While yet the eye and
+ear of man can detect no signs whatever of the impending outburst of
+nature's forces and the earth is bathed in the smiles of the sky, the
+camels, by some subtle, unerring instinct, prognosticate the storm.
+
+"I looked over the whole firmament. Not a cloud in sight. A soft
+zephyr and a mellow sun glowing genially through a slight autumnal
+haze. Not a sign of a storm, but the camel had spoken. I dismounted at
+once. I undid the package of shoes. From my pocket I took a small
+square bit of stone of the cubical contents of a small pea. It was cut
+from the side of the cave where Mohammed rested during the Hegira, or
+flight of Mohammed, with which date we begin our calendar. This bit of
+stone was reputed to be an efficacious amulet against dangers of
+storms, and also a charm against suddenly falling in love. I placed it
+in the toe of the right shoe. Unbeknownst to her, Mildred would be
+protected against these dangers. I could not hope to dissuade her from
+the voyage by telling her of the camel's forewarning. Ashton Hanks was
+to be one of the yachting party and he had shown evidences of a tender
+regard for her. Retying the package, it was not long before I had
+placed it in the hands of Mildred. With a most winsome smile she
+thanked me and ran in to don the new purchases.
+
+"The boat set sail and I watched it glide westward over the sparkling
+waves, toward the lower end of the lake, watching for an hour until it
+had slipped behind some point and was lost to sight. Then I scanned
+the heavens to see if the storm I knew must come would break before it
+was time for the yachting party to return. Low on the northern horizon
+clouds were mustering, their heads barely discernible above the rim of
+the world. But for the camel's warning I would not have seen them. The
+storm was surely coming. By six o'clock, or thereabouts, it would
+burst. The party was to have its fish-fry at six, at some point on the
+south shore. On the south shore would be the wreck, if wreck there was
+to be.
+
+"With no definite plan, no definite purpose, save to be near my love
+in the threatening peril, I set out for the south shore. By water, it
+is from a mile and a half to three miles across Green Lake. By land,
+it is many times farther. From road to road of those parallel with the
+major axis of the lake, it is four miles at the narrowest, and it is
+three miles from the end of the lake before you reach the first north
+and south road connecting the parallels. Ten miles, then, after you
+leave the end of the lake on the side where the hotels are, before you
+are at the end on the other side. And then thirteen miles of shore.
+
+"So what with the distance and the time I had spent watching the
+shallop that contained my love pass from my field of vision the
+afternoon had far waned when I had reached the opposite shore, and
+when I had descended to the beach at a point where I had thought I
+might command the most extensive view and discover the yacht, if it
+had begun to make its way homeward, the light of day had given place
+to twilight. But not the twilight of imminent night, the twilight of
+the coming tempest. For the brewing of a fearful storm had now some
+time been apparent. A hush lay on the land. A candle flame would have
+shot straight upward. Nature waited, silently cowering.
+
+"To the northward advanced, in serried columns of black, the beetling
+clouds that were turning the day into night, the distant booming of
+aerial artillery thundering forth the preluding cannonade of the
+charge. Higher and higher into the firmament shot the front of the
+advancing ranks in twisting curls of inky smoke, yet all the while the
+mass dropped nearer and nearer to the earth and the light of day
+departed, save where low down in the west a band of pale gold lay
+against the horizon, color and nothing more, as unglowing as a yellow
+streak in a painted sunset. Against this weird, cold light, I saw a
+naked mast, and then a sail went creaking up and I heard voices. They
+had been shortening sail. By some unspent impulse of the vanished
+wind, or the impact of the waves still rolling heavily and glassily
+from a recent blow, the yacht was still progressing and came moving
+past me fifty or sixty feet from shore.
+
+"I heard the voices of women expressing terror, begging the men to do
+something. Danger that comes in the dark is far more fearsome than
+danger which comes in the light. I heard the men explaining the
+impossibility of getting ashore. For two miles on this coast, a line
+of low, but unscalable cliffs rose sheer from the water's edge,
+overhanging it, in fact, for the waves had eaten several feet into the
+base of the cliffs. To get out and stand in front of these cliffs was
+to court death. The waves of the coming storm would either beat a man
+to death against the rocks, or drown him, for the water was four feet
+deep at the edge of the cliffs and the waves would wash over his head.
+For two miles, I have said, there was a line of cliffs on this coast,
+for two miles save just where I stood, the only break, a narrow rift
+which, coinciding with a section line, was the end of a road coming
+down to the water. They could not see this rift in the dusk, perhaps
+were ignorant of its existence and so not looking for it.
+
+"The voices I had heard were all unfamiliar and it was not until the
+yacht had drifted past me that I was apprised it was indeed the craft
+I sought by hearing the voice of Mildred saying, with an assumed
+jocularity that could not hide the note of fear:
+
+"'What will _I_ do? All the other girls have a man to save them. I am
+the extra girl.'
+
+"I drove my long-legged steed into the water after the boat none too
+soon, for the whistling of a premonitory gust filled the air. Quickly
+through the water strode the camel, and, with his lariat in my hand, I
+plumped down upon the stern overhang just as the mainsail went
+slatting back and forth across the boat and everybody was ducking his
+head. In the confusion, nobody observed my arrival.
+
+"'She's coming about,' cried the voice of the skipper, Gannett. 'A few
+of these gusts would get us far enough across to be out of danger from
+the main storm.'
+
+"But she did not come about. I could feel the camel tugging at the
+lariat as the swerving of the boat jerked him along, but presently the
+strain ceased, for the boat lay wallowing as before. Again a fitful
+gust, again the slatting of the sail, the skipper put his helm down
+hard, the boat put her nose into the wind, hung there, and fell back.
+
+"'She won't mind her helm!'
+
+"'She won't come about!'
+
+"'She acts as if she were towing something, were tied to something!'
+
+"'What's that big rock behind there? Who the devil is this? And how
+the devil did he get here?'
+
+"In the midst of these excited and alarmed exclamations came the
+solemn, portentous voice of the camel tolling out in the unnatural
+night the tocsin of the approaching hurricane.
+
+"'It's the Dago!' cried Gannett, examining me by the fleeting flash of
+a match. 'It's his damned camel towing behind that won't let us come
+about. Pitch him overboard!'
+
+"'Oh, save me!' appealed Mildred.
+
+"There she had been, sitting just in front of me and I hadn't known it
+was she. It was not strange that she had faith that I who had arrived
+could also depart.
+
+"'Selim,' I called, pulling the camel to the boat. I had never had a
+name for him before, but it was high time he had one, so now I named
+him. 'Selim,' and there the faithful beast was and with Mildred in my
+arms, I scrambled on to his back and urged him toward the rift in the
+wall of cliff.
+
+"As if I had spurned it with my foot, the boat sprang away behind us,
+a sudden rushing blast filling her sails and laying her almost over,
+and then she was out of our sight, into the teeth of the tempest,
+yelling, screaming, howling with a hundred voices as it darted from
+the sky and laid flat the waves and then hurled them up in a mass of
+stinging spray.
+
+"In fond anticipation, I had dwelt upon the homeward ride with
+Mildred. A-camelback, I was, as it were, upon my native heath, master
+of myself, assured, and at ease. I had planned to tell her of my love,
+plead my cause with Oriental fervor and imagery, but before we reached
+shore the tempest was so loud that she could not have heard me unless
+I had shouted, and I had no mind to bawl my love. Worse still, when
+once we were going across the wind and later into it, I could not open
+my mouth at all. We reached the hotel and on its lee side I lifted her
+down to the topmost of the piazza steps. I determined not be delayed
+longer. If ever there was to be a propitious occasion, it was now when
+I had rescued her from encompassing peril. I retained hold of her
+hand. She gave me a glance in which was at least gratitude, and I
+dared hope, something more, and I was about to make my declaration,
+when she made a little step, her right foot almost sunk under her and
+she gave an agonized cry and hobbling, limping, hopping on one foot,
+passed from me across the piazza to the stairs leading to the second
+story, whither she ascended upon her hands and knees.
+
+"That wretched stone from the cavern where Mahommed slept in the
+Hegira! How many times during the day had she wanted to take her shoe
+off? She would ascertain the cause of her torment, she would lay it to
+me. It had indeed been an amulet against sudden love. I was the man
+whose love it had forefended.
+
+"'Gannett's yacht went down and all aboard of her were drowned,' said
+one of the bellboys to me. 'Everybody in the hotel is feeling
+dreadful.'
+
+"'How do you know they are drowned?'
+
+"'Everybody in the hotel says so. I don't know how they found out.'
+
+"'What's that at the pier?' said I.
+
+"The lights at the end of the pier shone against a white expanse of
+sail and there was a yacht slowly making a landing.
+
+"Someone came and stood for a moment in an open window above me and
+there floated out the voice of one of the sisters Decatur, but which
+one, I could not tell. Their voices were much alike and I had not
+heard either of them speak very often.
+
+"'Do you think that one ought to marry a person who rescues her from
+death, when he happens to be a Dago and cheap circus man into the
+bargain? I certainly do not.'
+
+"Which one was it? Which one was it? Imagine my feelings, torn with
+doubt, perplexity, and sorrow. Was it Mildred, replying scornfully to
+some opinion of her sister, or was it the sister taking Mildred to
+task for saying she wished or ought to marry me? How was I to know?
+Could I run the risk of asking the girls themselves?"
+
+The emir paused, and it was plain to be seen from the workings of his
+countenance that once more he was living over this unhappy episode.
+
+"I can well imagine your feelings and sympathize with them," said Mr.
+Middleton. "There you sat in the encircling darkness, asking yourself
+with no hope of an answer, 'Was it Mildred? Was it her sister? Was it
+Mildred contemptuously repudiating the idea of marriage with me, or
+the sister haughtily scoffing at some sentiments just professed by
+Mildred? But I should not have spent too long a time asking how I was
+to know. I should put the matter to the test and had it out with
+Mildred, Miss Mildred, I should say."
+
+The emir looked steadily at Mr. Middleton. There was surprise,
+annoyance, perhaps even vexation in his gaze. With incisive tones, he
+said:
+
+"How could you so mistake me? Ours is a line whose lineage goes back
+twelve hundred years, a noble and unsullied line. Could I, sir, think
+of making my wife, making a princess of my race, a woman who could
+entertain the thought of stooping to marry a Dago cheap circus man?
+Suppose I had gone to Mildred and had asked her if she had expressed
+herself of such a demeaning declaration? Suppose she had said, 'Yes,'
+then there I would have been, compromised, caught in an entanglement
+from which as a man of honor, I could not withdraw. The only thing to
+do was to keep silence. The risk was too great, I resolved to leave on
+the morrow. For the first time did I learn that I was believed to be a
+Dago and the proprietor of the little menagerie. This strengthened my
+resolve to leave.
+
+"I left. Your happy encounter with the young ladies in the restaurant
+changed all. They learned from you that I was their social equal. They
+looked me up and apologized for their apparent lack of appreciation of
+my services and explained that they thought me a Dago circus man. I
+learned that neither of them believed in a mesalliance, that the
+question I had heard was a rhetorical question merely, one not
+expecting an answer, much used by orators to express a strong negation
+of the sentiments apparently contained in the question. But I have not
+yet learned which girl it was who asked the question. It is entirely
+immaterial and I don't think I shall try to find out, even after I am
+married, for of course you have surmised I am to be married, to be
+married to Mildred."
+
+"Yes, another American heiress marries a foreign nobleman," said Mr.
+Middleton, with a bitterness that did not escape the emir.
+
+"Permit me to correct a popular fallacy," said the emir. "Nothing
+could be more erroneous than the prevalent idea that American girls
+marry foreign noblemen because attracted by the glitter of rank,
+holding their own plain republican citizens in despite. Sir, it takes
+a title to make a foreigner equal to American men in the eyes of
+American women. A British knight may compete with the American mister,
+but when you cross the channel, nothing less than a count will do in a
+Frenchman, a baron in the line of a German, while, for a Russian to
+receive any consideration, he must be a prince.
+
+"And now," said the emir, "my little establishment here being about to
+be broken up, I am going to ask you to accept certain of my effects
+which for sundry reasons I cannot take with me to my new abode. My
+jewels, hangings, and costumes, my wife will like, of course. But as
+she is opposed to smoking, there are six narghilehs and four
+chibouques which I will never use again. As I am about to unite with
+the Presbyterian church this coming Sunday, it might cause my wife
+some disquietude and fear of backsliding, were I to retain possession
+of my eight copies of the Koran. She may be wise there," said the emir
+with a sigh. "If perchance you should embrace the true faith and
+thereby make compensation for the loss of a member occasioned by my
+withdrawal----"
+
+"That would not even matters up," interrupted Mr. Middleton, "for I am
+not a Presbyterian, but a Methodist."
+
+"Oh," said the emir. "Well, there are five small whips of rhinoceros
+hide and two gags. My wife will not wish me to keep those, nor a
+crystal casket containing twenty-seven varieties of poisons. Then
+there are other things that you might have use for and I have not. I
+have sent for a cab and Mesrour will stow the things in it."
+
+At that moment the cab was heard without and Mesrour began to load it
+with the gifts of the emir. At length he ceased his carrying and stood
+looking expectantly. With an air of embarrassment, and clearing his
+throat hesitatingly, the emir addressed Mr. Middleton.
+
+"There is one last thing I am going to ask you to take. I cannot call
+it a gift. I can look upon your acceptance of it in no other light
+than a very great service. Some time ago, when marriage in this
+country was something too remote to be even dreamed of, I sent home
+for an odalisque."
+
+The emir paused and looked obliquely at Mr. Middleton, as if to
+observe the effect of this announcement. That excellent young man had
+not the faintest idea what an odalisque might be, but he had ever made
+it a point when strange and unknown terms came up, to wait for
+subsequent conversation to enlighten him directly or by inference as
+to their meaning. In this way he saved the trouble of asking questions
+and, avoiding the reputation of being inquisitive and curious, gained
+that of being well informed upon and conversant with a wide range of
+subjects. So he looked understandingly at the emir and remarking
+approvingly, "good eye," the emir continued, much encouraged.
+
+"To a lonely man such as I then was, the thought of having an
+odalisque about, was very comforting. Lonely as I then was, an
+odalisque would have afforded a great deal of company."
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Middleton. "Why, even cats are company. The
+summer I was eighteen, everybody in our family went out to my
+grandfather's in Massachusetts, and I stayed home and took care of the
+house. I tell you, I'd been pretty lonely if it hadn't been for our
+two cats."
+
+"But now I am going to be married and my wife would not think of
+tolerating an odalisque about the house. She simply would not have it.
+The odalisque arrived last night, and I am in a great quandary. I
+could not think of turning the poor creature out perhaps to starve."
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Middleton. "Some persons desiring to dispose
+of a cat, will carry it off somewhere and drop it, thinking that more
+humane than drowning it. But I say, always drown a cat, if you wish to
+get rid of it."
+
+"Now I have thought that you, being without a wife to object, might
+take this burden off my hands. I will hand you a sum sufficient for
+maintenance during a considerable period and doubtless you can, as
+time goes on, find someone else who wants an odalisque, or discover
+some other way of disposal, in case you tire----"
+
+"Send her along," said Mr. Middleton, cordially and heartily. "If
+worst comes to worst, there's an old fellow I know who sells parrots
+and cockatoos and marmosets, and perhaps he'd like an odalisque."
+
+"I will send her," said the emir.
+
+"So it's a she," quoth Mr. Middleton to himself. He had used the
+feminine in the broad way that it is applied indefinitely to ships,
+railways trains, political parties etc., etc., with no thought of
+fitting a fact.
+
+"I will give you fifteen hundred dollars for her maintenance. Having
+brought her so far, I feel a responsibility----"
+
+"But that is such a large sum. I really wouldn't need so much----"
+
+"That is none too large," rejoined the emir. "I wish her to be treated
+well and I believe you will do it. At first, she will not understand
+anything you say to her, of course, but she will soon learn what you
+mean. The tone, as much as the words, enlightens, and I think you will
+have very little trouble in managing her."
+
+"Is there a cage?" hazarded Mr. Middleton, "or won't I need one?"
+
+"Lock her in a room, if you are afraid she will run away, though such
+a fear is groundless. Or if you wish to punish her, the rhinoceros
+whips would do better than a cage. A cage is so large and I could
+never see any advantage in it. But you will probably never have
+occasion to use even a whip. You will have but this one odalisque. Had
+you two or three, they might get to quarreling among themselves and
+you might have use for a whip. But toward you, she will be all
+gentleness, all submission."
+
+Mr. Middleton and the emir then turned to the counting and accounting
+of the fifteen hundred dollars, and so occupied, the lawyer missed
+seeing Mesrour pass with the odalisque and did not know she had been
+put in the hack until the emir had so apprised him.
+
+"She is in a big coffee sack," said the emir. "The meshes of the
+fabric are sufficiently open to afford her ample facility for
+breathing, and yet she can't get out. Then, too, it will simplify
+matters when you get to your lodgings. You will not have to lead her
+and urge her, frightened and bewildered by so much moving about, but
+pack her upon your back in the bag and carry her to your room with
+little trouble.
+
+"And now," continued the emir, grasping Mr. Middleton's hands warmly,
+"for the last time do I give you God-speed from this door. I will not
+disguise my belief that our intimacy has in a measure come to an end.
+As a married man, I shall not be so free as I have been. I am no
+longer in need of seeking out knowledge of strange adventures. The
+tyrannical imam of Oman, who imprisoned my brother, is dead, and his
+successor, commiserating the poor youth's sorrows, has not only
+liberated him, but given him the vermillion edifice of his
+incarceration. This my brother intends to transmute into gold, for he
+has hit upon the happy expedient of grinding it up into a face powder,
+a rouge, beautiful in tint and harmless in composition, for the rock
+was quarried in one of the most salubrious locations upon the upper
+waters of the great river Euphrates. I trust I shall sometimes see you
+at our place, where I am sure I shall be joined in welcoming you by
+Mrs.--Mrs.--well, to tell the truth," said the emir in some slight
+confusion, "I don't know what her name will be, for it is obviously
+out of the question to call her Mrs. Achmed Ben Daoud, and she objects
+to the tribal designation of Alyam, which I had temporarily adopted
+for convenience's sake, as ineuphonious."
+
+"Sir, friend and benefactor, guiding lamp of my life, instructor of my
+youth and moral exemplar," said Mr. Middleton, in the emotion of the
+moment allowing his speech an Oriental warmth which the cold
+self-consciousness of the Puritan would have forbade, had he been
+addressing a fellow American, "I cannot tell you the advantages that
+have flowed from my acquaintance with you. It was indeed the turning
+point of my life. The pleasure I will leave untouched upon, as I must
+alike on the present occasion, the profits. Let me briefly state that
+they foot up to $3760. A full accounting of how they accrued, would
+consume the rest of the night, and so it must be good-bye."
+
+As Mr. Middleton looked back for the last time upon that hospitable
+doorway, he saw the gigantic figure of Mesrour silhouetted against the
+dim glow beyond and there solemnly boomed on the night air, the Arabic
+salutation, "Salaam aleikoom."
+
+
+
+
+_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Eighth and Last Gift of the
+Emir._
+
+
+Getting into the hack and settling into the sole remaining vacant
+space Mesrour had left in loading the vehicle with the emir's gifts,
+Mr. Middleton was so preoccupied by a gloomy dejection as he reflected
+that a most agreeable, not to say inspiring and educating, intimacy
+was at last ended, that he reached his lodgings and had begun to
+unload his new possessions, before he thought of the odalisque. There
+lay the coffee sack lengthwise on the front seat and partially
+reclining against the side of the carriage. He was greatly surprised
+at the size of the unknown creature and began to surmise that it was
+an anthropoid ape, though before his speculations had ranged from
+parrots through dogs to domesticated leopards. Leaving the coffee sack
+until the last, he gingerly seized the slack of the top of the bag and
+proceeded to pull it upon his shoulders, taking care to avoid holding
+the creature where it could kick or struggle effectually, for despite
+all the emir had told him of the gentleness of the odalisque, he was
+resolved to take no chances. Whatever the creature was, she had slid
+down, forming a limp lump at the end of the bag, when he charily
+deposited it on the floor and turned to consult his dictionary before
+untying it. He was going to know what the creature was before he dealt
+with her further, a creature so large as that.
+
+_Odalisque._ A slave or concubine in a Mohammedan harem!!
+
+A woman!!!
+
+Mr. Middleton tore at the string by which the bag was tied, full of
+the keenest self-reproach. The uncomfortable position during the long
+ride, the worse position in which she now lay. The knots refused to
+budge and snatching a knife, with a mighty slashing, he ripped the bag
+all away and disclosed the slender form of a woman crouched, huddled,
+collapsed, face downward, head upon her knees. Turning her over and
+supporting her against his breast in a sitting posture, Mr. Middleton
+looked upon the most loveliness, unhappiness, and helplessness he had
+ever beheld.
+
+For a moment his heart almost stopped as he looked into the still
+face, but he saw the bosom faintly flutter, slow tears oozed out from
+under the long lashes of the closed lids, and the cupid's bow mouth
+gave little twitches of misery and hopelessness. With what exquisite
+emotions was he filled as he looked down upon the head pillowed upon
+his breast, with what sentiments of anger, with what noble chivalry!
+
+A Moslem woman. A Moslem woman, who even in the best estate of her sex
+as free and a wife, goes to her grave like a dog, with no hope of a
+life beyond, unless her husband amid the joys of Paradise should turn
+his thoughts back to earth and wish for her there among his houris.
+But this poor sweet flower had not even this faint expectation, for
+she was no wife nor could be, slave of a Mohammedan harem. No rights
+in this world nor the next. Not even the attenuated rights which law
+and custom gave the free woman. No sustaining dream of a divine
+recompense for the unmerited unhappiness of this existence. A slave, a
+harem slave, wanted only when she smiled, was gay, and beautiful; who
+must weep alone and in silence, in silence, with never a sympathetic
+shoulder to weep upon after they sold her from her mother's side. Tied
+in a bag, going she knew not whither, thrown in a carriage like so
+much carrion, in these indignities she only wept in silence, for her
+lord, the man, must not be discomposed. Like the timorous, helpless
+wild things of the woods whose joys and sorrows must ever be voiceless
+lest the bloody tyrants of their domain come, who even in the crunch
+of death hold silence in their weak struggles, this poor young thing
+bore her sufferings mutely, for her lord, the man, must not be
+discomposed, choking her very breath lest a sob escape. Mr. Middleton,
+in a certain illuminating instinct which belongs to women but only
+occasionally comes to some men, saw all this in a flash without any
+pondering and turning over and reflecting and comparing, and he said
+to himself under his breath, not eloquently, but well, as there came
+home to him the heinousness of that abhorrant social system dependent
+upon the religious system of the Prophet of Mecca, "Damn the emir and
+Mohammed and the whole damned Mohammedan business, kit and boodle!"
+
+In this imprecation there was a piece of grave injustice which Mr.
+Middleton would not have allowed himself in calmer mood, for the emir
+was about to become a member of one of the largest and most
+fashionable Presbyterian congregations in the city and ought not to
+have been included in an anathema of Moslemry and condemned for
+anything he upheld while in the benighted condition of Mohammedanism.
+
+Mr. Middleton continuing to gaze, as who could not, upon that
+beautiful unhappy face, suddenly he imprinted upon the quivering lips
+a kiss in which was the tender sympathy of a mother, the heartening
+encouragement of a friend, and the ardent passion of a lover. The
+odalisque opened her lovely hazel eyes and _seeing_ corroboration of
+all the _touch_ of the kiss had told her, as she looked into eyes that
+brimmed with tears like hers, upon lips that quivered like hers, she
+let loose the flood gates of her woes in a torrent of sobs and tears,
+and throwing herself upon his shoulders, poured out her long pent
+sorrows in a good cry.
+
+It was only a summer shower and the sun soon shone. She did not weep
+long. Too filled with wonder and surpassing delight was this daughter
+of the Orient in her first experience with the chivalry of the
+Occident. She must needs look again at this man whose eyes had welled
+full in compassion for her. She would court again his light and
+soothing caresses, his gentle ministrations, so different from the
+brutal pawing of the male animals of her own race, the moiety with
+souls. Ah, how poignantly sweet, how amazing, that which to her
+American sisters was the usual, the commonplace, the everyday!
+
+She raised her head. Her tears no longer flowed, but her lips still
+quivered, in a pleading little smile; and her bosom still fluttered,
+in a shy and doubting joy, and in her mind floated a half-formed
+prayer that the genii whose craft had woven this rapturous dream,
+would not too soon dispel it.
+
+Mr. Middleton gazed at her. He had never seen a face like that, so
+perfectly oval; never such vermillion as showed under the dusk of her
+cheeks and stained the lips, narrow, but full. What wondrous eyes were
+those, so large and lustrous, illumining features whose basal lines of
+classic regularity were softly tempered into a fluent contour. A
+circlet of gold coins bound her brow, shining in bright relief against
+the luxuriant masses of chestnut hair. A delicate and slender figure
+had she, yet well cushioned with flesh and no bones stood out in her
+bare neck.
+
+Moved not by his own discomfort on the hard floor, but by the possible
+discomfort of the odalisque, Mr. Middleton at length raised her and
+conducted her to a red plush sofa obtained by the landlady for soap
+wrappers and a sum of money, which having turned green in places and
+therefore become no longer suitable for a station in the parlor, had
+been placed in this room a few days before. Upon this imposing article
+of furniture the two sat down, and though at first Mr. Middleton did
+no more than place his arm gently and reassuringly about the girl's
+waist and hold her hand lightly, in the natural evolution,
+progression, and sequence of events, following the rules of contiguity
+and approach--rhetorical rules, but not so here--before long the cheek
+of the fair Arab lay against that of the son of Wisconsin and her arm
+was about his neck and every little while she uttered a little sigh of
+complete, of unalloyed content. What had been yesterday, what might be
+to-morrow, she was now happy. As for Mr. Middleton, what a stream of
+delicious thoughts, delicious for the most part because of their
+unselfishness and warm generosity, flowed through his head. What a joy
+it would be to make happy the path of this girl who had been so
+unhappy, to lay devotion at the feet of her who had never dreamed
+there was such a thing in the world, to bind himself the slave of her
+who had been a slave.
+
+Then, too, he luxuriated in the simple, elementary joy of possession
+and the less elementary joy of possession of new things, whether new
+hats, new clothes, new books, new horses, new houses, or new girls,
+and which is the cause why so many of us have new girls and new beaux.
+And when he looked ahead and saw only one logical termination of the
+episode, he swelled with a pride that was honest and unselfish, as he
+thought how all would look and admire as he passed with this lovely
+woman, his wife.
+
+He could have sat thus the whole night through, but the girl must be
+tired, worn by the sufferings of this day and many before. He motioned
+toward the bed and indicated by pantomime that she should go to it.
+She would have descended to her knees and with her damask lips brushed
+the dust from his shoes, if she had thought he wished it, but she knew
+not what he meant by his gesturing and sat bewildered in eager and
+anxious willingness. So arranging the bed for her occupancy, he took
+her in his arms and bore her to it and dropped her in. The riotous
+blushes chased each other across her cheeks as she lay there with eyes
+closed, so sweet, so helpless, so alone.
+
+For a little season he stood there gazing, gloating, enravished, like
+to hug himself in the keen titillation of his ecstasy and this was not
+all because this lovely being was his, but because he was hers.
+
+Glancing about the room preliminarily to leaving, and wondering what
+further was to be done for the girl's comfort and peace of mind, he
+bethought him of an ancient tale he had once read. In this narration,
+fate having made it unavoidable that a noble lord should pass the
+night in a castle tower with a fair dame of high degree and there
+being but one bed in the apartment, he had placed a naked sword in the
+middle of the bed between them and so they passed the night, guarded
+and menaced by the falchion, for the nonce become the symbol of bright
+honor and cold virtue. Mr. Middleton had often wondered why the knight
+did not sleep on the floor, or outside the door, as he himself now
+intended doing. But it occurred to him that some such symbol might
+reassure the Arab damosel and having no sword, he drew one of the
+large pistols the emir had given him and approached the bed to lay it
+there.
+
+The girl's eyes had now opened and Mr. Middleton started as he beheld
+her face. Once more the hunted, helpless look it had worn when first
+he had looked on it. But more. Such an utter fear and sickening unto
+death. But not fear, terror for herself. Fear for the death of an
+ideal, a fear caused by her misinterpretation of his intent with the
+pistol. It had not been real, it had not been real. He was as other
+men, the men of her world and all the world was alike and life not
+worth living. With a finesse he had not suspected he possessed, he
+laid the pistol on a pile of legal papers on a table at the bed's
+head, a pile whose sheets a suddenly entering breeze was whirling
+about the room. How obvious it was he had brought the pistol for a
+paper weight. Once more the girl was smiling as he drew the clothes
+over her, all dressed as she was, and kissing shut her drowsy eyes, he
+left her in her virginal couch.
+
+On the mat before the door in the hallway without, he disposed himself
+as comfortably as he could. With due regard for the romantic
+proprieties, he tried to keep within the bounds of the mat. But it was
+too short, his curled up position too uncomfortable, and so he
+overflowed it and could scarcely be said to be sleeping on the mat. It
+was too late to arouse the landlady and although he was there by
+choice, it could not have been otherwise.
+
+After snatches of broken sleep, after dreams waking and dreams
+sleeping, which were all alike and of one thing and indistinguishable,
+he was at length fully awake at a little before six and aware of an
+odor of tobacco smoke. Applying his nose to the crack of the door, he
+finally became convinced that it came from his room. Wondering what it
+could possibly mean, and accordingly opening the door, opening it so
+slowly and gradually that the odalisque could have ample time to seek
+the cover of the bed clothes, he stepped in.
+
+There sat the odalisque on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, puffing
+away at his big meerschaum, blowing clouds that filled the room. On
+the table lay an empty cigarette box that had been full the night
+before. This had not belonged to Mr. Middleton, who was not a
+cigarette smoker and despised the practice, but had been forgotten by
+Chauncy Stackelberg on a recent visit. The fingers of her right hand
+were stained yellow, not by the cigarettes of that one box, but the
+unnumbered cigarettes of years. Mr. Middleton had not noticed these
+fingers the night before, but had been absorbed by her face, and this
+as beautiful, as piquant, as bewitching as before, looked up at him,
+the lips puckered, waiting, longing.
+
+He stood there, stock-still, stern, troubled, dismayed.
+
+She moved over, where she sat on the edge of the bed, with mute
+invitation, and Mr. Middleton continuing to stand and stare, she moved
+again and yet again, until she was against the headboard. And still he
+did not sit beside her, thinking all the time of the young lady of
+Englewood whose pure Puritan lips never had been and never could be
+defiled by cigarettes and tobacco. The young lady of Englewood, the
+young lady of Englewood, what a jewel of women was she and what a fool
+he had been and how unkind and inconsiderate! Recalled by a little
+snuffle from the odalisque, he saw the puckered lips were relaxing
+sorrowfully and fearing the girl would cry, he hastily sat down beside
+her and put his right arm about her. But he did not take the shapely
+hand that now laid down the meerschaum, and though her head fell on
+his shoulder and her breath came and went with his, he did not kiss
+her, for that breath was laden with tobacco. Nor did his fingers stray
+through those masses of silken hair, for he was sure they were full of
+the fumes of tobacco. There with his arm about the soft, uncorsetted
+form of that glorious beauty, her own white forearm smooth and cool
+about his neck, he was thinking of the young lady of Englewood.
+
+Poor odalisque! Why cannot he speak to you and tell you? You would
+wash away those yellow stains with your own blood, if you thought he
+wished it. Forego tobacco? Why, you would cease to inhale the breath
+of life itself, for his sake.
+
+Out of the grave came all the dead Puritan ancestors of Mr. Middleton,
+a long procession back to Massachusetts Bay. The elders of Salem who
+had ordained that a man should not smoke within five miles of a house,
+the lawgivers who had prescribed the small number, brief length, and
+sad color of ribbons a woman might wear and who forbade a man to kiss
+his wife on Sunday, all these righteous and uncomfortable folk stirred
+in Mr. Middleton's blood and obsessed him.
+
+Fatima, Nouronhor, or whatever your name might be, my fair Moslem, why
+did fate throw you in with a Puritan? Yet I wot that had it been one
+from a strain of later importation from Europe, you had not been so
+safe there last night. The Puritans may be disagreeable, but they are
+safe, safe.
+
+Part of this Mr. Middleton was saying over and over to himself--the
+latter part. The Puritans are safe. The young lady of Englewood was
+safe. She was good, she was beautiful, too, in her calm, sweet,
+Puritan way. He must see her at once, he would go---- A sigh, not
+altogether of content, absolute and complete, recalled to him the
+woman pressed against his side. She must be taken care of, disposed
+of. Asylum? No. Factory? No, no. Theater, museum? No, no, no. He would
+find some man to marry her. There must be someone, lots of men, in
+fact, who would marry a girl so lovely, who needn't find out she
+smoked until after marriage, or who would not care anyway. All this
+might take time. He would be as expeditious as possible, however. He
+called Mrs. Leschinger, the landlady, and entrusting the girl to her
+care, departed to visit a matrimonial agency he knew of.
+
+He looked over the list of eligibles. He read their misspelled,
+crabbedly written letters. There was not one in the lot to whom a man
+of conscience could entrust the Moslem flower, even if she did smoke.
+
+"There is apparently not one man of education or refinement in the
+whole lot," exclaimed Mr. Middleton.
+
+"That's about right," said the president of the agency. "Between you
+and I, there ain't many people of refinement who would go at marrying
+in that way. You don't know what a lot of jays and rubes I have to
+deal with. Often I threaten to retire. But occasionally a real
+gentleman or lady does register in our agency. Object, fun or
+matrimony. Now I have one client that is all right, all right except
+in one particular. He is a man of thirty-five or six, fine looking,
+has a nice house and five thousand dollars a year clear and sure. But
+he's stone deaf. He wants a young and handsome girl. Now I could get
+him fifty dozen homely young women, or pretty ones that weren't
+chickens any longer, real pretty and refined, but you see a real
+handsome young girl sort of figures her chances of marrying are good,
+that she may catch a man who can hear worth as much as this Crayburn,
+which ain't a whole lot, or that if she does marry a poor young chap,
+he'll have as much as Crayburn does when he is as old as Crayburn. Now
+I'm so sure you'll only have your trouble for your pains, that I won't
+charge you anything for his address and a letter of introduction. I
+don't believe you have got a girl who will suit, for if you have, she
+won't take Crayburn. Here's his picture."
+
+Mr. Middleton looked upon the photograph of a man who seemed to be
+possessed of some of the best qualities of manhood. It was true that
+there was a slight suspicion of weakness in the face, but above all it
+was kindly and sympathetic.
+
+"A good looking man," said Mr. Middleton.
+
+"Smart man, too," said the matrimonial agent. "He graduated from the
+university in Evanston and was a lawyer and a good one, until a friend
+fired off one of those big duck guns in his ear for a joke."
+
+Taking the odalisque with him in a cab, Mr. Middleton was off for the
+residence of Mr. Crayburn.
+
+"Will she have me?" asked Mr. Crayburn, when he had read Mr.
+Middleton's hastily penciled account of the main facts of his
+connection with the fair Moslem, wherein for brevity's sake he had
+omitted any mention of the fifteen hundred dollars the emir had given
+him for assuming charge of her.
+
+"Of course," wrote Mr. Middleton.
+
+"I never saw a more beautiful woman," exclaimed Mr. Crayburn. "By the
+way, have you noticed any predilections, habits, wants, it would be
+well for me to know about?"
+
+"She smokes," wrote Mr. Middleton, not knowing why he wrote it, and
+wishing like the devil that he hadn't the moment he had.
+
+"All Oriental women smoke. I will ask her not to as soon as she learns
+English."
+
+Mr. Middleton was amazed to think that such a simple solution had not
+occurred to him. But he was glad it was so, for he had not been
+unscathed by Cupid's darts there last night and he might not now be
+about to visit the young lady of Englewood.
+
+"Your fee," said Mr. Crayburn.
+
+Mr. Middleton had not thought of this. He looked about at the
+handsomely furnished room. He thought of the five thousand dollars a
+year and the very much smaller income he could offer the young lady of
+Englewood. He thought of these things and other things. He thought of
+the young lady of Englewood; of the odalisque, toward whom he occupied
+the position of what is known in law as next friend. She sat behind
+him, out of his sight, but he saw her, saw her as he saw her for the
+first time, when, ripping the bag away, she lay there in her piteous,
+appealing helplessness.
+
+"There is no fee. The maiden even has a dowry of fifteen hundred
+dollars. Please invest it in her name. Oh, sir, treat her kindly."
+
+"Treat her kindly!" exclaimed the deaf man with emotion. "He would be
+a hound who could ill treat one so helpless and friendless, a stranger
+in a strange land, whose very beauty would be her undoing, were she
+without a protector."
+
+Much relieved, Mr. Middleton prepared to depart and the odalisque saw
+she was not to be included in his departure. She noted the luxurious
+appointments of the house, so different from the threadbare and seedy
+furnishings of Mr. Middleton's one lone room, but rather a thousand
+times would she have been there. A tumult of yearning and love filled
+her heart, but beyond the slow tears in her eyes and the trembling
+lips, no one could have guessed it. Once more she was a Moslem slave,
+sold by the man whom last night she had thought----She bowed to kismet
+and strangled her feelings as she had so many times before. And so
+after a shake of the hand, Mr. Middleton left her, left her to learn
+as the idol of Mr. Crayburn's life, with every whim gratified, that
+the first American she had known was but one of millions.
+
+Away toward Englewood hastened Mr. Middleton, reasoning with himself
+in a somewhat casuistical manner. His conscience smote him as he
+thought of the previous night. But what else could anybody have done?
+Deprived of the power of communicating by the means of words, he had
+by caresses assuaged her grief and stilled her fears and now it was
+too plain he had made her love him and he had left her in desolation.
+But heigho! what was the use of repining over spilled milk and
+nicotined fingers that another man and good would care for, and he
+himself had not been unscathed by Cupid's darts there the night
+before.
+
+The young lady of Englewood was just putting on her hat to go out and
+was standing before the mirror in the hallway. Mr. Middleton had never
+called at that hour of the day. For months he had not called at all
+and she never expected that he would again. So without any
+apprehension at all, she was wearing one of the green silk shirt
+waists she had made from the Turkish trousers he had given her, and
+had just got her hat placed to suit her, when there he was!
+
+She turned, blushing furiously. Whether it was the confusion caused
+her by being discovered in this shirt waist, or the joy of seeing him
+again and the complete surrender, she made in this joy, so delectable
+and unexpected and which was not unmixed with a little fear that if he
+went away this time, he would never come back again, never! whether it
+was these things or what not, she made no struggle at all as Mr.
+Middleton threw his arms about her, threw them about her as if she
+were to rescue him from some fate, and though he said nothing
+intelligible for some time, but kissed her lips, cheeks, and nose,
+which latter she had been at pains to powder against the hot sun then
+prevailing, she made no resistance at all and breathed an audible
+"yes," when he uttered a few incoherent remarks which might be
+interpreted as a proposal of marriage.
+
+Here let us leave him, for all else would be anti-climax to this
+supreme moment of his life. Here let us leave him where I wish every
+deserving bachelor may some day be: in the arms of an honest and
+loving woman who is his affianced wife.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton, by
+Wardon Allan Curtis
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE ADVENTURES MR. MIDDLETON ***
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