ommonplace--C. J.
Cleggett, the Brooklynite-this person whom young reporters conceived of
as the staid, dry prophet of the dusty Fact--was secretly a mighty
reservoir of unwritten, unacted, unlived, unspoken romance. He ate it,
he drank it, he breathed it, he dreamed it. The usual copyreader, when
he closes his eyes and smiles upon a pleasant inward vision, is
thinking of starting a chicken-farm in New Jersey. But Cleggett--with
gray sprinkled in his hair, sober of face and precise of manner, as the
world knew him--lived a hidden life which was one long, wild adventure.

Nobody had ever suspected it. But his room might have given to the
discerning a clue to the real man behind the mask which he
assumed--which he had been forced to assume in order to earn a living.
When he reached the apartment, a few minutes after his encounter on the
bridge, and switched the electric light on, the gleams fell upon an
astonishing clutter of books and arms....

Stevenson, cavalry sabers, W. Clark Russell, pistols, and Dumas; Jack
London, poignards, bowie knives, Stanley Weyman, Captain Marryat, and
Dumas; sword canes, Scottish claymores, Cuban machetes, Conan Doyle,
Harrison Ainsworth, dress swords, and Dumas; stilettos, daggers,
hunting knives, Fenimore Cooper, G. P. R. James, broadswords, Dumas;
Gustave Aimard, Rudyard Kipling, dueling swords, Dumas; F. Du
Boisgobey, Malay krises, Walter Scott, stick pistols, scimitars,
Anthony Hope, single sticks, foils, Dumas; jungles of arms, jumbles of
books; arms of all makes and periods; arms on the walls, in the
corners, over the fireplace, leaning against the bookshelves, lying in
ambush under the bed, peeping out of the wardrobe, propping the windows
open, serving as paper weights; pictures, warlike and romantic prints
and engravings, pinned to the walls with daggers; in the wardrobe,
coats and hats hanging from poignards and stilettos thrust into the
wood instead of from nails or hooks. But of all the weapons it was the
rapiers, of all the books it was Dumas, that he loved. There was Dumas
in French, Dumas in English, Dumas with pictures, Dumas unillustrated,
Dumas in cloth, Dumas in leather, Dumas in boards, Dumas in paper
covers. Cleggett had been twenty years getting these arms and books
together; often he had gone without a dinner in order to make a payment
on some blade he fancied. And each weapon was also a book to him; he
sensed their stories as he handled them; he felt the pe