ry free of charge, he evinced considerable surprise. I
then ventured to approach Mr. Morgan and to hand him a journal
containing the cabled summary of Mr. Blank's disclosures, which he
proceeded to peruse. His comments I must reserve for the next mail, the
cable clerks here demurring to their transmission.

Only a dream? But a sweet one. Bustle about, Baconians, and bring it
true. Don't listen to my florist.

A HOME-COMING

Belike, returning from a long pilgrimage, in which you have seen many
strange men and strange cities, and have had your imagination stirred
by marvellous experiences, you have never, at the very end of your
journey, almost in sight of your home, felt suddenly that all you had
been seeing and learning was as naught--a pack of negligible illusions,
faint and forgotten. From me, however, this queer sensation has not
been withheld. It befell me a few days ago; in a cold grey dawn, and in
the Buffet of Dover Harbour.

I had spent two months far away, wandering and wondering; and now I had
just fulfilled two thirds of the little tripartite journey from Paris
to London. I was sleepy, as one always is after that brief and twice
broken slumber. I was chilly, for is not the dawn always bleak at
Dover, and perforated always with a bleak and drizzling rain? I was
sad, for I had watched from the deck the white cliffs of Albion coming
nearer and nearer to me, towering over me, and in the familiar drizzle
looking to me more than ever ghastly for that I had been so long and so
far away from them. Often though that harsh, chalky coast had thus
borne down on me, I had never yet felt so exactly and lamentably like a
criminal arrested on an extradition warrant.

In its sleepy, chilly shell my soul was still shuddering and
whimpering. Piteously it conjured me not to take it back into this
cruel hum-drum. It rose up and fawned on me. 'Down, Sir, down!' said I
sternly. I pointed out to it that needs must when the devil drives, and
that it ought to think itself a very lucky soul for having had two
happy, sunny months of fresh and curious adventure. 'A sorrow's crown
of sorrow,' it murmured, 'is remembering happier things.' I declared
the sentiment to be as untrue as was the quotation trite, and told my
soul that I looked keenly forward to the pleasure of writing, in
collaboration with it, that book of travel for which I had been so
sedulously amassing notes and photographs by the way.

This colloquy was held at a