cksheesh,' I answered tartly.

'Look here, Carl!' Dave jerked himself erect in the middle of his bed.
'Suppose you wanted to get in with those people, how would you do it?'

'Dave,' I replied, 'why weren't you born with just a little bump of
what you mistakenly call imagination? I'll show you to-morrow how to
do the thing.'

'How?' Dave stubbornly insisted.

'Well, if I must talk all night, suppose in the morning we go to
Cairo, and find our way to some one in some small degree an
authority--some one who can talk a little English, and most of them
can. I might offer my man a cigar, and praise his show a bit, and then
tell him how I want to tell the world all about him; how I want to see
how they live, not so briefly, you understand. The circumlocution
office is as much in vogue in the Orient as, according to our mutual
friend Dickens, it is in old England. Well, when he fully understands
that I admire their life and manners, and want to live it as well as
write it, I begin to bid. They're here for money, and they won't let
any pass them--see?'

'Old man!' cried Dave, smiting his knee with vigour, 'I'm going to try
it on!'

* * * * *

It was seven days before our invalid--as we now by mutual consent
called the still nameless guard--recovered his senses fully. There had
been two or three days of the stupor, and then a brief season of
active delirium; and at this stage the surgeon shook his head and
looked very serious; and the little Quakeress, who, true to her first
intention, came alone, carried away with her a face more serious
still.

'She looks,' said the surgeon to me, 'as much shocked as if he were
one of her own people.'

'She has a tender heart,' I replied, 'and--he is quite well known, I
believe, to others of her family.'

'To one, assuredly,' he said, with a dry smile and a quick glance; and
I knew that June Jenrys' interest in the insensible guard had been as
plain to this worldly-wise surgeon as to me.

Remembering this brief dialogue, I was not surprised, when I made my
brief call in Washington Avenue, to note an added shade of seriousness
on the fair face that, since the disappearance of Gerald
Trent--unknown, but the friend of her friend--had been growing graver
day by day, so that the charms of the great Fair had palled upon her,
and she had made her daily visits in a subdued and preoccupied mood,
and shortened them willingly, to return at an early hour with t