ed an entirely new
suit, new hat, and new shoes. The incriminating documents, he placed
under the carpet in his room against a time when he might see an
opportunity to safely dispose of them to the pecuniary advantage of
himself and to the discomfiture of the contemptible creature whose
handiwork they were.

He said nothing of these transactions when on the appointed evening he
once more sat in the presence of the urbane prince of the tribe of
Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet,
Achmed began the narration of The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson.

_The Adventure of Miss Clarissa Dawson._

Miss Clarissa Dawson was a young lady who had charge of the cutlery
counter in one of the great emporiums of State Street. She was
reckoned of a pretty wit and not more cutting were the Sheffield
razors that were piled before her than the remarks she sometimes made
to those who, incited thereto by her reputation for readiness of
retort, sought to engage her in a contest of repartee. It was seldom
that she issued from these encounters other than triumphant, leaving
her presumptuous opponents defeated and chagrined. But in the month of
November of the last year, for once she owned to herself that she had
been overcome,--overcome, it is true, because her adversary was
plainly a person of stupidity, mailed by his doltishness against the
keenest sarcasm she could launch against him, yet nevertheless
overcome. To her choicest bit of irony, the individual replied,
"Somebody left you on the grindstone and forgot to take you off," to
which the most adroit in quips and quirks could find no fitting
replication, unless it were to indulge in facial contortion or
invective, and Miss Clarissa was too much of a lady to do either.
Forced into silence, she had no resource but to seek to transfix him
with a protracted and contemptuous stare, which, though failing to
disconcert the object, put her in possession of the facts that he had
mild blue eyes, that the remnants of his hair were red, that he was
slightly above middle height and below middle age, and that there was
little about his face and still less his figure to distinguish him
from a multitude of men of the average type. Indeed, one could not
even conjecture his nationality, for his type was one to be seen in
all branches of the Indo-European race. If from a package in his upper
left-hand coat pocket, which, broken, disclosed some wieners, you
concluded h