Chapter V: Part 5

"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.