his
fancy and his imagination had so often carried him while he stood over
the desk filing the accounts of invoices from foreign parts.

It might be finally added that, had he at all conceived how soon and
to what a degree his sudden inclination for adventure was to be
gratified, his romantic aspirations might have been somewhat dashed at
the prospect that lay before him.

II

_The Mysterious Lady with the Silver Veil_

At that moment our hero suddenly became conscious of the fact that a
small wicket in a wooden gate near which he stood had been opened, and
that the eyes of an otherwise concealed countenance were observing him
with the utmost closeness of scrutiny.

He had hardly time to become aware of this observation of his person
when the gate itself was opened, and there appeared before him, in the
moonlight, the bent and crooked figure of an aged negress. She was
clad in a calamanco raiment, and was further adorned with a variety of
gaudily colored trimmings, vastly suggestive of the tropical world of
which she was an inhabitant. Her woolly head was enveloped, after the
fashion of her people, in the folds of a gigantic and flaming red
turban constructed of an entire pocket handkerchief. Her face was
pock-pitted to an incredible degree, so that what with this deformity,
emphasized by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and
the rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg
thought that he had never beheld a figure at once so extraordinary and
so repulsive.

It occurred to our hero that here, maybe, was to overtake him such an
adventure as that which he had just a moment before been desiring so
ardently. Nor was he mistaken; for the negress, first looking this way
and then that, with an extremely wary and cunning expression, and
apparently having satisfied herself that the street, for the moment,
was pretty empty of passers, beckoned to him to draw nearer. When he
had approached close enough to her she caught him by the sleeve, and,
instantly drawing him into the garden beyond, shut and bolted the gate
with a quickness and a silence suggestive of the most extravagant
secrecy.

At the same moment a huge negro suddenly appeared from the shadow of
the gatepost, and so placed himself between Jonathan and the gate that
any attempt to escape would inevitably have entailed a conflict, upon
our hero's part, with the sable and giant guardian.

Says the negress, looking very intently