r would he longer permit me to occupy the same room with him
--precious privilege!--but engaged a palatial suite for himself,
with a parlor, while I had a small and modest room farther down
the hall. In some respects this suited me well, however, since I
was now able to induce him to have his meals served upstairs. Yet
I began to see the foolishness of thinking that we could elude the
police should they set out to seek seriously for us, since, apart
from changing our names, we were making no effort at disguising
ourselves.

The day after our arrival, Hawkins slept late and I slipped out
about ten o'clock and wandering aimlessly came to Barristers' Hall,
where twenty years before old Tuckerman Toddleham had his office.
The day was warm and humid, like that upon which so long ago I had
visited the old lawyer when a student at Harvard and had received
from him my sentence. Even as then, some birds were twittering
around the stone window-ledges. An impulse that at the moment was
beyond my control led me up the narrow, dingy stairs to the landing
where the lawyer's office had been. A green-baize door, likely
enough the same one, still hung there--where the lawyer's office
had been. Naught about the room was altered. There were the
bookcases, with their glass doors and green-silk curtains; the
threadbare carpet, the portrait of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason
over the fireplace; the old mahogany desk; the little bronze paper-
weight in the shape of a horse; the books, brown and faded with
years; and at the desk--I brushed my hand across my eyes--at the
desk sat old Tuckerman Toddleham himself!

For the first time in my entire existence, so far as I can now
remember, I was totally nonplussed and abashed. I could not have
been more astonished had I walked into the family lot in the Salem
cemetery and found my grandfather sitting on his own tombstone;
but there the old lawyer surely was, as certainly as he had been
there twenty years before; and the same sensations that I had always
experienced as a child while in his presence now swept over me and
made me feel like a whipped school-boy. Not for the world would
I have had him see me and be forced to answer his questions as to
my business in the city of Boston; so, holding my breath, I tiptoed
out of the door, and the last vision I ever had of him was as he
sat there absorbed in some legal problem, bending over his books,
the sunlight flooding the mote-filled air of the