n framing the
message in intelligible language and a legible chirography. I had torn
up the first half-completed draft and was engaged on the opening
paragraph of the second when the clamour of a fresh altercation fell on
my ear, causing me to glance up from my task. The porter, it appeared,
had laid hands on Zeno the Great's black box, possibly with a view to
shifting it from where it lay on the floor directly in the doorway;
whereupon its owner became seized with a veritable berserk rage.
Uttering loud cries and denunciations he fell on the porter and wrested
the box from his grasp; following which the porter fled into the street,
being immediately lost from view in the distance.

Turning to me, Zeno the Great was in the midst of saying that, though
bereft of his scrapbook of clippings and his set of photographs, he
hoped to be eternally consigned to perdition--his meaning if not his
exact phraseology--if anybody got away with the even more precious
belongings yet remaining to him, when nearing sounds of hurrying feet
and many shrill voices from without caused him to break off.

In apprehension, more or less successfully concealed from casual
scrutiny, I rose to my feet. At the same instant the porter
precipitately re-entered, closely followed by six gendarmes, eight foot
soldiers, a personage in a high hat, whom I afterward ascertained to be
the mayor, and a mixed assemblage of citizens of both sexes and all
ages, amounting in the aggregate to a multitude of not inconsiderable
proportions. Agitating his arms with inconceivable activity and crying
out words of unknown purport at the top of his lungs, the porter pointed
accusingly at Zeno, at the locked box, at me!

For the moment I was left unmolested. With loud and infuriated cries the
gendarmes threw themselves on the black box. The foot soldiers hurled
themselves on Zeno the Great, precipitating him to the floor, and quite
covering him up beneath a quivering and straining mass of human forms.
The mayor tripped over a stool and fell prone. The populace gave vent to
shrill outcries. In short and in fine, I may affirm, without fear of
successful contradiction, that chaos reigned supreme.

One felt that the time had come to assert one's sovereign position as an
American citizen and, if need be, as a member of a family able to trace
its genealogy in an unbroken line to the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers
at or near Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. I drew forth from my po