l of the experiences of Dr. McDill, Mr. Middleton did not carry
the pistols as he went about his daily vocation. It was impossible to
so bestow them about his garments that they did not cause large and
unsightly protuberances and to carry them openly was not to be thought
of. Their weight, too, was so great that it was burdensome to carry
them in any manner. Coming into his room unexpectedly in the middle of
the forenoon of the Thursday following the acquisition of the weapons,
he surprised Hilda Svenson, maid of all work, in the act of examining
one of them, which she had extracted from the place where they lay
concealed in the lower bureau drawer beneath a pile of underclothing.
With a start of guilty surprise, Hilda let the pistol fall to the
floor. Fortunately it did not go off, but nonetheless was he convinced
that he ought to dispose of the two weapons, for any day Hilda might
shoot herself with one, while on the weekly sheet changing day, Mrs.
Leschinger, the landlady, might shoot herself with the other. There
was no place in the room where he could conceal them from the
painstaking investigations of Hilda and Mrs. Leschinger, and the
expedient of extracting the charges not occurring to him, he felt that
it was clearly his duty to remove the lives of the two women from
jeopardy by disposing of the pistols. He was in truth pained at the
necessity of parting with the gifts which the emir had made with such
solicitude for his welfare and as some assuagement to this regret he
sought to dispose of them as profitably as possible. With this end in
view, he made an appointment for a private audience after hours with
Mr. Sidney Kuppenheimer, who conducted a large loan bank on Madison
Street and was reputed a connoisseur and admirer of all kinds of
curios.

On the evening for which he had made the appointment, he set forth,
intending to make an early and short call upon his friend Chauncy
Stackelberg and wife, before repairing to Mr. Kuppenheimer's place of
business. But such was the engaging quality of the conversation of the
newly married couple, abounding both in humor and good sense, and so
interested was he in hearing of the haps and mishaps of married life,
a state he hoped to enter as soon as fortune and the young lady of
Englewood should be propitious, that he was unaware of the flight of
time until in the midst of a pause in the conversation, he heard the
cathedral clock Mrs. Stackelberg's uncle had given her as a