sted in
ransacking his "box" for a pen. There was a plenty of steel pens on his
table with the ink bottle, but he was English. The English people
manufacture steel pens for nineteen-twentieths of the globe, but they
never use any themselves. They use exclusively the pre-historic quill.
My lord not only found a quill pen, but the best one he had seen in
several years--and after writing diligently for some time, closed with
the following entry:

BUT IN ONE THING I HAVE MADE AN IMMENSE MISTAKE, I OUGHT TO
HAVE SHUCKED MY TITLE AND CHANGED MY NAME BEFORE I STARTED.

He sat admiring that pen a while, and then went on:

"All attempts to mingle with the common people and became permanently one
of them are going to fail, unless I can get rid of it, disappear from it,
and re-appear with the solid protection of a new name. I am astonished
and pained to see how eager the most of these Americans are to get
acquainted with a lord, and how diligent they are in pushing attentions
upon him. They lack English servility, it is true--but they could
acquire it, with practice. My quality travels ahead of me in the most
mysterious way. I write my family name without additions, on the
register of this hotel, and imagine that I am going to pass for an
obscure and unknown wanderer, but the clerk promptly calls out, 'Front!
show his lordship to four-eighty-two!' and before I can get to the lift
there is a reporter trying to interview me as they call it. This sort of
thing shall cease at once. I will hunt up the American Claimant the
first thing in the morning, accomplish my mission, then change my lodging
and vanish from scrutiny under a fictitious name."

He left his diary on the table, where it would be handy in case any new
"impressions" should wake him up in the night, then he went to bed and
presently fell asleep. An hour or two passed, and then he came slowly to
consciousness with a confusion of mysterious and augmenting sounds
hammering at the gates of his brain for admission; the next moment he was
sharply awake, and those sounds burst with the rush and roar and boom of
an undammed freshet into his ears. Banging and slamming of shutters;
smashing of windows and the ringing clash of falling glass; clatter of
flying feet along the halls; shrieks, supplications, dumb moanings of
despair, within, hoarse shouts of command outside; cracklings and
mappings, and the windy roar of victorious flames!

Bang, ba