e some excuse for returning late,
and turned in to bed. His room was the guest-chamber--a little,
muggy, stifling box, with bed and bedding of eider down sewed into
canvas sacks. He threw off his boots and lay down in his clothes.
Hour followed hour and he did not sleep. He was nevertheless not
wholly awake, but retained a sort of sluggish consciousness which his
dazed brain could not govern. Twelve had chimed from the great clock
of the turret overhead as he lay down, and he heard one, two, three,
and four follow in their turn. By this time he was feeling a dull
pain at the back of his head, and a heavy throbbing in his neck.
Until then he had been ever a man of great bodily strength, with
never an ache or ailment. "I am making myself ill before anything is
done," he thought, "and if I fall sick nothing can come of my
enterprise. That must not be." With an effort of will he composed
himself to sleep. Still for a space he saw the weary night wear on;
but the lapse, the broken thread, and the dazed sense stole over him
at last, and he dropped into a deep slumber. When he awoke the white
light of midday was coming in strong dancing bars through the rents
of the dark blanket that covered the little window, the clock of the
Cathedral was chiming twelve once again, and over the little cobble
causeway of the street in front there was the light patter of many
sealskin shoes. "How could I sleep away my time like this with so
much to do?" he thought, and leapt up instantly.

His old landlady had more than once looked in upon him during the
morning, and watched him with an air of pity. "Poor lad, he looks
ill," she thought; and so left him to sleep on. While he ate his
breakfast, of skyr and skate and coffee, the good soul busied herself
about him, asking what work he had a mind to do now that he had come
back, and where he meant to look for it, with other questions of a
like kind. But he answered her many words with few of his own, merely
saying that he intended to look about him before deciding on
anything, and that he had something in his pocket to go on with in
the meanwhile.

Some inquiries he made of her in his turn, and they were mainly about
the new President, or Governor; what like he was to look upon, and
what his movements were, and if he was much seen in the town. The
good body could tell him very little, being old, very deaf, and
feeble on her feet, and going about hardly at all farther than the
floors of the Cath