attorney, be so derelict to professional honor, as to betray the
secrets of my client. We have chosen to call this three hundred
dollars--a check for which you will give me in advance--payment for
the services I am about to perform. In reality, I consider it only
part of what you owe for the miserably underpaid services of the past
three years."

As Mr. Middleton wended his way homeward, it was with some melancholy
that he recalled how, on previous occasions when good fortune had
added to his stock of wealth, he had rejoiced in it because he saw his
dreams of marriage with the young lady of Englewood approaching
realization more and more. But now they had drifted apart. Not once
had he seen her since that fatal night. On several evenings he had
made the journey to Englewood and walked up and down before her house,
but not so much as her shadow on the curtain had he seen. Let her make
the first move toward a reconciliation. If she expected him to do so
after her treatment of him, she was sadly mistaken.

_The Adventure of Achmed Ben Daoud._

Being curious to hear of the young ladies who had inquired concerning
the emir in the restaurant, and to learn what their connection with
that prince might be, Mr. Middleton repaired to the bazaar on Clark
Street on the succeeding night. But the emir was not in. Mesrour
apparently having experienced one of those curious mental lesions not
unknown in the annals of medicine, where a linguist loses all memory
of one or more of the languages he speaks, while retaining full
command of the others--Mesrour having experienced such a lesion, which
had, at least temporarily, deprived him of his command of the English
language, Mr. Middleton was unable to learn anything that he desired
to know, until bethinking himself of the fact that alcohol loosens the
thought centers and that by its agency Mesrour's atrophied brain cells
might be stimulated, revivified, and the coma dispelled, he made
certain signs intelligible to all races of men in every part of the
world and took the blackamore into a neighboring saloon, where, after
regaling him with several beers, he learned that only an hour before
an elegant turnout containing two young women, beautiful as houris,
had called for the emir and taken him away.

"He done tole me that if I tole anybody whar he was gwine, he'd
bowstring me and feed mah flesh to the dawgs."

Mr. Middleton shuddered as he heard this threat, so characteristical